The Red Letters

In ancient Rome, feast days were indicated on the calendar by red letters.

To my mind, all poetry and art serves as a reminder that every day we wake together beneath the sun is a red-letter day.

––Steven Ratiner

Red Letter Poem #251

Four Seasons in the Dining Room

In the winter

they planned their flight

In the spring

he fell

backwards down

a flight of stairs

In the summer

he didn’t know where he was

How are the glaciers

he asked me over the phone

In the fall—

it was always the fall—

he was still falling

but he was home

He could even play the piano

In the winter

a cough shook him so hard

ribs broke

When he came home

from the hospital

he was in the dining room

music was falling

from the China cabinet

from a little CD player

above the hospital bed

Music was falling

slantwise

like the gold ray

of the Annunciation

in medieval paintings

Music was falling

Four Seasons

Vivaldi

He listened to the music

It lifted him up

carried him

made it easier to breathe

And then it was easier to rest

from the work

of breathing altogether

––Jennifer Clarvoe

In a conversation decades ago, Mary Oliver told me that a poem, when it was finished, is the culmination of a thousand carefully considered choices. Or ten thousand. The poet must live inside each subsequent draft of the text until every decision, great or small––which originally appeared through inspiration, chance, or sheer mystery––has now been, if not settled in the poet’s mind, then at least rendered for what it is. We hone our work as best we can, but every experienced writer well knows that another day––another change in circumstance or the cerebral weather––might easily throw the poem into a new light, unsettling even those decisions of which one felt most confident. So when Jennifer Clarvoe first showed me this poem from a manuscript-in-progress, I was immediately struck by her choice of omitting all punctuation (something she does not routinely do.) But I had to abide with the poem for a time in order to fully appreciate how that one choice was affecting everything within this pared-down deeply-affecting narrative.

Beginning with the title, we are prepared for a round of seasons to pass within this verse (or perhaps the cycles of many years.) “In the winter/ they planned their flight”––and these unnamed protagonists are about to engage in one of the activities many couples prize above all others: travel, perhaps to some longed-for destination. (Of course, flight could also imply ‘escape from’––and, for some reason, Carpaccio’s “The Flight into Egypt” popped into my mind, a painting depicting the Holy Family trying to escape a cruel fate for their newly-blessed household.) But before we readers can conjure the excitement of airline tickets and packed luggage, the poem darts ahead: “In the spring/ he fell/ backwards down/ a flight of stairs”. Even before it was confirmed by the other poems surrounding it in the manuscript, the image of aging parents was becoming clear. And that provoked thoughts of the situation we all must ultimately contend with––despite its unpredictability and infinite variety––as an inescapable fate. Did it begin to feel to you that the seasons were suddenly speeding up? Summer/confusion (the pathos of those imagined glaciers, just when the world was turning a lush green); autumn/piano (and oh, the ineffable comfort of music!); winter again, and those brittle ribs, the agony provoked by every labored breath. What torment is worse than the empathetic pain we cannot help but take on––witnessing the suffering of someone we love, and which we are powerless to alleviate? Perhaps you shared my experience that our mounting sense of helplessness within this poem is magnified by the lack of punctuation. Stepping away from her usual measured pentameters, Jennifer told me these “falling” lines felt “vertiginous.” These are days of a spiraling descent––and, despite the small glories, the inexorable shadow chills the mind. The lack of any typographical escapement mechanism, which would regulate the clock’s gears and keep time from spinning out of control, helps build a sense of desperation. To be sure, there are moments of intense beauty presented here––the imagined strains of Vivaldi sweeping past, or the gorgeous phrasing the poet presents: “Music was falling/ slantwise/ like the gold ray/ of the Annunciation/ in medieval paintings;” they give the heart an almost-tangible lift. But these are interwoven with a slow-accumulating grief, as we anticipate a time when (and, to my mind, it’s the most tragic realization a child can have) it must eventually come as a relief that our parents are about to be freed from time’s cruel mechanism.

Jennifer’s poem, “Four Seasons…,” will appear in her collection PIANO PIANO which, I am happy to report, is set to be published by Unbound Edition Press in April of 2026. Professor of English, Emerita, from Kenyon College, she is the author of two previous poetry books––and her work has been featured in scores of journals such as Poetry Northwest; and the Triquarterly, Threepenny, and Yale Reviews. Honors and awards abound. What I find most attractive in her work is an unbridled intellectual curiosity, and a deep commitment to the communal power language has in our lives. Studying the varied choices which enrich her writing offers a masterclass in how each adjustment, every nuance adds to the overall effect. “A poem is never finished, only abandoned”––or so Paul Valéry reminds us. Perhaps we poets make what choices we are capable of making, with whatever skill and discernment we have acquired over many seasons––and then we must surrender the poem to the world, and our hearts to this human circumstance.

The Red Letters

* If you would like to receive these poems every Friday in your own in-box – or would like to write in with comments or submissions – send correspondence to:

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* To learn more about the origins of the Red Letter Project, check out an essay I wrote for Arrowsmith Magazine:

https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/community-of-voices

and the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

http://dougholder.blogspot.com

* For updates and announcements about Red Letter projects and poetry readings, please follow me on BlueSky

@stevenratiner.bsky.social

and on Twitter

@StevenRatiner

And coming soon:

a new website to house all the Red Letter archives at StevenRatiner.com

Severity and Invention

What [A] finds so admirable about [S]

is his severity as well as his invention

of a technique that provides music

with an alternative to tonal harmony

and to classical inflection, color, rhythm.

––Edward Said

Severity and invention—

how the v’s in the middle of those words yoke together

opposing impulses

how the yoked wings levitate and hover

over inflection, color, rhythm

like the revenant crows

over the late v-ridden wheatfield of van Gogh’s:

V after dark V darkly arriving, revving—

making everything veer and waver:

the vibrating grain, the brush, the path, the wind—

making the visible reverberate

and the buried invisible—

the vanishing point—

infused in the very canvas.

Also, unhinged, set free:

available if one is able

to flutter over the void

at eventide

and find in the vanishing light

some wavelength of necessity and delight.

––Jennifer Clarvoe

[Note: the epigraph is taken from Edward Said’s On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain. “A” here is Adorno; “S” is Schoenberg.]

My commentary in Red Letter #218 was instigated by a question, posed to a small group of friends, by the estimable Askold Melnyczuk: novelist, editor, educator, activist. He challenged us: “what role can poetry continue to play in a world so riven by violence?” In my first consideration of the question, I found myself speaking about art-making as a confirmation of the very conception of we, the communality we cannot help but share (even when so much surrounding us seems hellbent on negating that perception.) This week, I’ve been trying to come to terms with what I find so admirable in this new poem from Jennifer Clarvoe; and I realized her work was clarifying a second aspect of my thinking: the indomitable need to create, and the intrinsic power of beauty. Even amid a world of widespread brutality, beauty ennobles us––and yes, I realize some will think that concept dated, revealing only my naiveté. But beauty coaxes us to experience once again that primary delight we felt when we first came to understand that, despite our worst fears, we too are undeniably beautiful (within and without), derived from and embodying the nature of this marvelous existence. How could we ever stop attempting to recreate that feeling?

Jennifer starts us out with an epigraph from Edward Said, the acclaimed Palestinian-American philosopher, literary critic, and political activist. Said was writing about the late works of great artists and what they reveal about the tension between hard-earned knowledge and "intransigence, difficulty and unresolved contradiction.” Does the clear-eyed severity of the critic counter or support the persistent impulse to bring something new into being? I sense Jennifer’s keen intellect wrestling with that idea––but almost immediately, once the pen is in hand, the creative part of the poet’s word-weaving brain latches onto what might seem at first a trivial perception: those two V’s within the contrasting concepts. And when those “yoked wings levitate and hover/ over inflection, color, rhythm”, suddenly they morph into a vision of the crows in Van Gogh’s wheat field (yet another ‘late’ work of art, by the way), while the verse is seemingly animated by Modernist composer Arnold Schoenberg’s liberating atonal and rhythmic experiments. Now, V after fricative V begin to mount within the poet’s lines, like vigorous daubs of color on a canvas. But they also feel like the aural representation of a psychic passageway, opening into the poet’s own memory––and don’t we all, at some point, remember contending with the mystery of visibility and invisibility? The material nature of our world versus that daunting question about what exists beyond it? After all, poems seem to arrive out of nowhere; and, taking shape (in the mind, on the page), we can be excused if we think we are participating in something (here comes that naiveté again) almost transcendent.

In case any are unfamiliar with this fine poet, let me mention briefly that Jennifer is Professor of English, Emerita, from Kenyon College; the author of two marvelous poetry collections, and scores of poems, essays and reviews featured in journals far and wide; and the recipient of more awards and honors than I’ve space to detail. Today’s poem will appear in her forthcoming collection, PIANO PIANO. And, if I may add a personal observation: having experienced the passionate intensity with which Jennifer speaks about poetry, she is the very sort of teacher each one of us dreamed of meeting in our classroom (if our literary stars were perfectly aligned.) And so, with each reading of “Severity and Invention,” I could feel those countercurrents colliding within the poet’s consciousness––but I was delighted to sense how, in the end, the creative impulse seems to have assumed the upper hand. What might have begun as a playful investigation––of how sound triggers thought which, in turn, conveys unexpected meaning––ends up feeling like a poet’s psalm. Plucking V after V on her invisible harp (I counted no less than 27 instances within the body of the poem––and that’s not including the title nor that final bit-lip required to pronounce the poet’s name,) Ms. Clarvoe reflects on how poetic invention culminates in the sort of vigorous delight (now she’s got me doing it!) which, looking up from the page, makes even this ordinary Friday seem a Red Letter day (if you’ve the heart to embrace it.)