Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene: Joyce Pesseroff

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 #280

Wise to the Sybil

Wise to the Sybil and my Nana

who at 90 wept God has forgotten me,

I don’t care to live forever.

That really sounds like hell.

But today, maybe. Gilded maples,

Blue sky, zephyrs teasing hair

on bare arms, the warbler’s sweet sweet

spiraling through a fall meadow––

if time stops, let it stop now.

I’d ask everyone I love to join me

at the event horizon, my old dog too,

snoozing and drooling beside

a water bowl––did you know the dogs

of war were real, trained by Saxons

to gut men in a shield wall? And I almost

wrote, “Blue sky, trees a living fire,”

but what a pestilential image now.

I try to banish war from my day,

but like a spaniel nosing the pillow

about to jump in bed with you––

the Sunday paper full of children who

won’t fuss another hour, their seasons

dust, skies a terror, wells a target––

it’s ready to be comfortable as hell.

––Joyce Peseroff

“The Sibyl, with frenzied mouth uttering things not to be laughed at, unadorned and unperfumed, yet reaches to a thousand years with her voice by aid of the god.” So writes Heraclitus in 500 BCE. And what started out as a single prophetess––the Oracle at Delphi––grows to at least ten by the dawn of the Common Era, scattered throughout Greece, Italy, and Asia Minor. Today’s poem, from the estimable Joyce Peseroff, poses the most challenging sorts of questions and seems to call out for divine intervention. Can life remain worthwhile once you’ve witnessed the abundance of suffering (both personal and societal) that seems ever-present? In many faith traditions––and at the core of humanist belief––life is the ultimate good. As a boy, I remember the quiet joy in my own grandmother’s voice at family gatherings when she’d say, raising a glass: l’chaim, to life. But if life’s vitality is paramount, then suffering becomes a kind of evil, a repudiation of what we value. Can a mind accept the presence of both and still savor the day, affirm purpose? The poet is seeing her grandmother slowly wasting away––like the Cumaean Sybil whose wish for eternal life brought ultimate regret, her body deteriorating until nothing but a voice remained. When existence persists beyond any remnant of delight––is life still too precious to surrender? The very notion of “hell” worms its way into the conversation, highlighting what’s at stake. And could there be a more hellish and heart-wrenching sentiment than the one Joyce’s grandmother utters: “God has forgotten me.”

So today’s poem appears to turn away from any wish for eternal life. . .yet it equivocates: this particular sun-blessed autumn day might provide the counterargument. “Gilded maples,/ Blue sky, zephyrs teasing hair/ on bare arms, the warbler’s sweet sweet/ spiraling through a fall meadow––// if time stops, let it stop now.” Perhaps such simple peace is fulfillment, a kind of paradise––momentary and yet somehow enduring. Might this provide a fitting point of departure from what older poets termed this vail of tears? Still, that final closing of the eyes would mean that all of her life––every face, every memory––would be carried into that “event horizon” with her. So how is she––and we––to feel about all this? But then Joyce shifts gears, seems to break the fourth wall, acknowledging the presence of her readers as she wrestles with this unfolding poem. “And I almost/ wrote, ‘Blue sky, trees a living fire,’/ but what a pestilential image now.” Even her profound joy is interrupted by thoughts of climate degradation, natural and manmade disasters, headlines reminding her of “of children who/ won’t fuss another hour, their seasons/ dust, skies a terror…”. The poet’s little detour-exegesis about ‘the dogs of war’ feels like a demonstration of the mind’s turmoil as she grapples with these concerns, trying to discover the path forward. Perhaps heaven and hell both lie at the tip of her pen.

Joyce is a poet, essayist, and educator; her sixth collection, Petition, was designated a “must-read” by the Massachusetts Book Award. She was the editor of Robert Bly: When Sleepers Awake; The Ploughshares Poetry Reader; and Simply Lasting: Writers on Jane Kenyon––working to illuminate the poets and literary traditions she sees as most vital. For that same reason, she directed and taught in UMass Boston’s MFA Program, and currently writes a poetry column for Arrowsmith Press. I consider her voice a vital element in the Red Letter community, and so I happily contend with the emotional crosscurrents enlivening her poems. And now I’m thinking: why not add Nana to that Sibylline sisterhood (Joyce’s grandmother, or mine, or yours, for that matter), because where else do we turn when needing sage advice, a dire warning, or the balm of a knowing smile? Should we not focus our deepest attention––and our inky skills––on those unexpectedly satisfying moments when life shines most brilliantly? Perhaps that’s all we ever have. If, perhaps, another such moment is given to us. . .and yet another. . .raise your glass, your pen in salute: l’chaim!

The Red Letters

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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 #218

American Song

(after Marcantonio Flaminio)

If you listen to the love-calls of birds as you walk

early to the bus stop, sweating a little

on the third day of a heat wave,

think of me in an apple orchard, the smell of sap

and dust from the once-living trees

cut down, the farmer done

with spraying, happy to sell the bloom of acres

to Lennar, builder of golf courses

and homes I could never afford,

nor could you. We’re alone with America’s plenty,

you on foot as a red Mustang blares past,

me in the cab of a backhoe,

A.C. on the fritz. If I fill a bucket with ripe fruit,

let’s picnic Sunday at Morse Park, green glen

soft with late-summer flowers.

––Joyce Peseroff

“Amaryllis, awake! Lead your snowy sheep to pasture while the cold grass

glitters with white dew.”

–– Marcantonio Flaminio

from: “Fête Gallante”

I was sitting with a group of writer-friends, enjoying conversation beneath hemlock shade, and a troublesome question was posed: what purpose does culture still serve in so battered and polarized a world? It’s a challenging thought, one we are still mulling over––but I have a single thread in my developing answer: it preserves the concept of we. We who have long shared this land; we whose memories preserve great tragedies and profound joys; and we who, day by day, attend to the simplest of activities, propelled by the most innately-human of impulses. When massive political forces have an interest in atomizing the population––thus making us more fearful, malleable––a song, play, painting, or poem that contains a vision of communality is quite a powerful instrument. In Robert Frost’s early poem “Mowing”, he closes with the couplet: “Men work together, I told him from the heart,/ Whether they work together or apart.” (Women too––I’m sure he’d add if he were writing today.) And Joyce Peseroff’s new poem demonstrates that connectivity, right from its opening dedication. Marcantonio Flaminio was a Humanist poet and scholar of the Italian Renaissance. His poem, “Fête Gallante”, came to Joyce via the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day postings (another cultural seed-spreader.) So, on a quiet morning, this 21^st century American poet unexpectedly got to have tea with a 16^th century counterpart who wrote in Latin and could never have imagined the world outside Joyce’s window.

Flaminio’s poem was not just a celebration of the pastoral moment––“To-day I will pasture my goats in a shady valley, for later it will be very hot.”––it was a billet-doux to his beloved with a specific intention in mind: “Dear, there I shall be alone, and if you love me, there you will come alone also.” No further explanation needed. Joyce began wondering just who those lovers might be in a context closer to home. Her little stream of tercets is so conversational, so utterly believable, how can we not be seduced by the intimate voice? I have mixed feelings about Joyce’s poem––and that attests to its power. The innate poetry (and what else can we call such language when, any of us, alone, are observant of our surroundings and attentive to our own inner voices) that arises from the speaker is open-hearted and coy, at the same time. Notice this beauty. . .but think of me. I imagined a young man in the backhoe, but of course readers will conjure assorted possibilities. And that sweet apple-smell in the air is, we need to remind ourselves, the smell of death––the “dust from the once-living trees”––as he works his construction job, obliterating orchards so that farms can be replaced by condo complexes and golf courses (“America’s plenty” indeed!) I find myself utterly delighted by his call to love––and quietly horrified by how easily he (and we, by extension) accept the destruction of the family farmer’s once-foundational place in society, along with the beauty of the natural world. All in the name of progress (or should I say commerce.) Ah, that bucket of ripe fruit, that picnic on Sunday, the coupling of willing hearts! Just don’t stop to think about where the children, the children’s children will find themselves one day.

Joyce has already given us six fine poetry collections, with more to come. Her most recent, Petition (Carnegie Mellon University Press) was named a “must-read” by the Massachusetts Book Awards. She is a poet, editor, and educator, representing a life-long commitment to the necessity of literature and the arts in the life of the community. Among her honors are grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, as well as a Pushcart Prize. I’m grateful for this bracingly-honest pastoral Joyce has given us. It made me hunt down a passage from the Roman poet Virgil’s Eclogues (carried over from the Latin by another cultural caretaker, David Ferry.)

Time takes all we have away from us;
I remember when I was a boy I used to sing
Every long day of summer down to darkness,
And now I am forgetting all my songs…

But he did not forget, and neither do we, because the poems preserved that voice for all time. Whether we know it or not, we are enmeshed in lineages such as this: Virgil, Dante, Flaminio; Dickinson, Frost, Peseroff; that amorous backhoe driver, you and me. We live here. We will perish. We will leave a world behind us––a little better than the way we found it (if that cultural force and the heart’s will can help guide our actions,) or perhaps smoldering after the conflagration. The answer is still being written.

Red Letters 3.0