The Red Letters :Flashback Friday––RLP#40

 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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Flashback Friday––RLP#40

 

 

 

 

 

Sense/Nonsense

I cook with my nose

When the toast burns

I snatch it out with tongs



I hear with my eyes

When the cat yearns

I recognize her songs



I taste with my ears

When the meat sears

I hear the flavor’s wrong



I know with my hands

When the pain churns

I jolt if it’s too strong



I see with my heart

When things come apart

I learn where they belong


—Deborah Melone


The new, for better or worse, is perhaps the most prized quality in art-making: cutting-edge creative style, the unanticipated voice or subject matter. But in truth every creation, even the most radical, has a bond with the vast catalog of all that’s come before. From what else could we fashion new work––or actively rebel against––but the world we’ve inherited? Our lives, our efforts, are links in a chain––in a tangled multiplicity of chains––that join us to sources often obscured in time’s vast unscrolling. So now, as we inch toward what promises to be a tumultuous new year, I’d like to revisit installment #40 which appeared in late December of 2020 during the first year of the Red Letter project.

But I have to start my commentary just a bit earlier, with Red Letter #37 featuring Lloyd Schwartz’s lovely poem “Song.” Of course, we can never know where a poem finds its genesis, but I was fascinated by this early memory Lloyd recounted: his mother reciting aloud to him Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s "Kubla Khan," when he was too young to read. I believe there is always a sound-signature that great poems leave on us––and his mother’s voice embodying Coleridge remains indelible for him. And though these other texts might not have been consciously in mind, Lloyd mentioned Frost’s “Fire and Ice” and Elizabeth Bishop’s “Sonnet” as part of his poem’s musical ancestry. Deborah Melone read Lloyd’s poem in these electronic pages and was enthralled by its lyricism––so much so that, after a few days, a new poem began taking shape in her notebook, one trying to recapture how that music had catalyzed something inside her. Deborah is the author of Farmers’ Market and The Wheel of the Year, and has work featured in the new anthology The Heart Off Guard––all issued from Every Other Thursday Press. I love how the rhymes and half-rhymes of her poem chime along with something approaching regularity––even as the imagery in each stanza twists and tugs to retain its freedom. The tone feels almost aphoristic––wisdom skewed, perhaps, by dream––and how can we resist? And now, reading “Sense/Nonsense”, who knows: maybe some of you, dear readers, will fall under Deborah’s melodic spell and be surprised by a new voice rising up in your own mind.



Ch’eng T’ang, the first king of the ancient Shang Dynasty, seeking a formula for happiness, had these words inscribed on his washbasin (nearly four millennia before Ezra Pound turned the Chinese phrase into a Modernist manifesto): Make it new, and again make it new. Can’t you imagine the king lifting cold water in cupped hands and then, as his eyes clear, re-reading this potent command? This morning, rinsing the shave cream from my own face, I looked down at the clean porcelain and imagined the same injunction, compelling in its invisible calligraphy. Back in 2020, we shared Deborah’s poem to help wash away the bitter residue of our first year of Covid. And now, as 2025 prepares to make its debut––hauling in a storm of unimaginable circumstance––I’ll offer up this wish: may we wash ourselves each morning in that ancient aspiration and rejuvenate possibility. But in doing so, may we also be mindful of all those hands that came before us, and all those yet to come: how every individual cups the same cool waters, dreaming of renewal.

 

 

 

Red Letters 3.0

 

* 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:

steven.arlingtonlaureate@gmail.com

 

 

* 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

Red Letter Poem #227

 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



SAVE THE DATE!



The fifth annual Red Letter LIVE! reading

will be held on Saturday, November 9th 2024

Robbins Library, Community Room, 700 Mass Ave, Arlington

1-3pm, with a reception to follow

Free, and all are welcome!



Featuring poets:



Danielle Legros Georges

Indran Amirthanayagam

Heather Treseler &

Steven Ratiner



with a musical performance by clarinetist

Todd Brunel



***If you’re in the Boston area, we’d love to see you there

A flyer is attached with artist biographies



Hosted by

Steven Ratiner and Jean Flanagan





Red Letter Poem #227


Foretold

July 4, 2024


The white sheet I dreamed

floating over us: for sleep

or was it shroud



cloud of un-



We should have known

when they called him Our

David (adultery/murder), Our

Cyrus (not one of us but)



We should

have heard King



Two more tanks!

he said in the dream

as if he were ordering coffee



Retribution



They gave him the right

to remain



––Martha Collins







Sometimes we’ll wake in a lather from a disturbing dream, and quickly dismiss its threat: just the unconscious having a Chicken Little-panic attack––and the sky is certainly not falling. But other times, opening our eyes, we’ll find the residue of the dream still vivid and terrifying, leaving us to grasp the full measure of what seems to be our prophetic imagination. On July 1st this past summer, in the matter of Trump v.United States, our nation’s highest court ruled that the President of this Republic has a near-blanket immunity from criminal prosecution for “official” acts. For the first time in our 250-year history, this seems to put our chief executive beyond the rule of law. With a Constitutional interpretation like this, a would-be tyrant could nullify an election, foment an armed insurrection, and simply refuse the peaceful transfer of power that has been the very hallmark of our democracy––all by framing his actions as part of his ‘official responsibilities.’ Quite a nightmare scenario. So it is no surprise that, just a few days later (and on the anniversary of this nation’s birth), Martha Collins found herself grappling with the latter. Martha––a poet whose artistic antenna is remarkably sensitive, attuned to both the outer machinations of our society as well the inner voice of conscience––took a bit of her nighttime terror and turned it into this brief but chilling poem.



It almost seems unnecessary to reintroduce Martha Collins in these electronic pages. Poet, translator, educator, cultural advocate, Martha is simply one of the most honored American literary talents writing today. She published her eleventh volume of poetry, Casualty Reports, with the Pitt Poetry Series in October 2022. The collection just prior to that, Because What Else Could I Do, is a wrenching response to the death of her husband; it won the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. Her trilogy about race and racism in America remains a monumental examination of our society’s most bitter fault lines and the source of our national grief. Other honors include fellowships from the NEA, the Bunting Institute, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Witter Bynner Foundation, as well as prizes too numerous to detail in this small space.



As her readers have come to expect, her poems exploring societal turmoil involve neither political rant nor emotional histrionics. They are carefully-wrought, musically-restrained verse––and thus their power is derived from the small modulations of tone and attention, drawing us into her unfolding vision. Here, she opens with an unimposing image––a white sheet floating above us––but we are unsure of whether this is simply part of the bedclothes or something from the tomb. The aural quality of the poem is, by turns, comforting (those chiming words like shroud and cloud, dreamand remain) and unsettling (oh, that burgeoning phrase cloud of un-, lopped off at the prefix!). And when supporters of the former President attempt to cloak him with the dignity of Biblical allusion (David. . .Cyrus. . .,) the poet punctures the pretense by calling out what they really seem to be proposing: a King, governing by fiat, and no longer subject to the will of the people. At the most crucial moment, the poem seizes us with one simple and simply devastating image: Two more tanks!/ he said in the dream/ as if he were ordering coffee. Indeed, we need not strain at deducing this individual’s political intent––the candidate has laid it all out in televised speeches. Machines of war. . .directed against one’s political enemies or legal protests of the citizenry––painful to even contemplate. But it is the casualness with which he makes these suggestions that ought to make us tremble. We’ve seen such scenes played out in banana republics and thought ourselves immune. Will Martha’s dream prove to be exaggerated fear or prophetic warning? Her quiet jeremiad takes this candidate at his word and prompts us to reexamine our own responsibilities. We must imagine what such an America would be like––not simply for ourselves but the generations that come after us. Unless, that is, we preempt that nightmare and use our electoral voices to insist on another narrative. Will our beloved country wake up in time? The answer will be arriving shortly.

 

 

 

 

Red Letters 3.0

 

* 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:

steven.arlingtonlaureate@gmail.com

 

 

* 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 Twitter           

@StevenRatiner

 

Red Letter Poem #183

 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 #183

 

 

 

 

Two Apartments and the Moon

 

 

Those years I slept narrow

on a pushed-shut sofa bed,

apartment house rooflines

packed both sides of the close street.

The moon never claimed the night

in that room.  Streetlight neutered

its traces, as did the tired bedsheet,

abandoned by someone else’s

onetime apartment-mate,

curtaining my single window.

 

*

 

When, in my decades shared with you,

I come to my feet at one a.m.,

pause at the kitchen window, moon-

light’s full expanse drapes the floor.

Lifts the previous day’s diseased news

like a draw of bad blood.

It will find me at four if again

I’m restless, up and wandering

to the front window and the still

street.  If I pretend to speak for it,

it says stop and look up now.

Fullness is not always with you.

 

 

––David P. Miller

 

 

 

 

Drinking alone, I raise my cup

to the bright moon.  Now
moon, my shadow, and me, a party of three. . .

 

                                    ––Li Bai

                                          (Tang Dynasty, China)

 

“I’ve always thought that––no matter what some say––there are not too many poems about the moon.”  David Miller told me this in an e-exchange about his first Red Letter appearance, “Two Apartments and the Moon”––and I heartily agree.  The moon seems an eternal presence in poetry: as subject matter, source of inspiration, sly obfuscation or tender reflection of our internal states of consciousness.  Still, poets keep finding new ways of allowing that lunar light to grace their lines.  And like their subject, famous moon poems traverse all borders, shine into windows everywhere: Li Bai, Rumi, and Basho; Shakespeare, Shelley, Dickinson, Whitman; Cummings, Plath, Langston Hughes, and continuing all through the contemporary masters.  In David’s piece, the moon is both absence (in the first section where, after a painful divorce, he finds himself in a depleted living situation more reminiscent of his student days), and presence (after the speaker is happily re-married and his life feels more like the fullness of an April moon.)  Reading the poem, I have no trouble remembering the loneliness depicted in that first section, where it seems that even the rooftops conspire to keep the poet in darkness.  David’s word choices––neutered. . .tired. . .abandoned––make me feel a void inside my chest, dark as a new moon.  But in the second section, I am able to feel gratitude (along with the speaker) for a more luminous circumstance––even if that variable orb provides a quiet warning about the changeable nature of things to which we human are subject.  And there, between those two worlds, a simple asterisk, like a single early star––where we each can pause and make our fragile wish.

 

David’s “life in the arts” began, not with literature, but theater: for 25 years, he was a member of the interdisciplinary Mobius Artists Group, a Boston-based collective still creating experimental new works.  For much of that time, he was also employed as a college librarian, and perhaps that helped prompt a new creative phase when, in his mid-fifties, he began to work seriously in poetry, a form he’d loved for years.  He has since published a chapbook and two full-length collections, (the most recent being Bend in the Stair from Lily Poetry Review Press.)  He is currently a member of the Jamaica Pond Poets group, and sits on the board of the venerable New England Poetry Club.

 

In her astonishing essay “Poetry and the Moon”, poet Mary Ruefle writes: “On the other hand, stars were the first text, the first instance of gabbiness; connecting the stars, making a pattern out of them, was the first story, sacred to storytellers.  But the moon was the first poem, in the lyric sense, an entity complete in itself, recognizable at a glance, one that played upon the emotions so strongly that the context of time and place hardly seemed to matter.”  In that same way, David offers us two theatrical tableaux, linked by a single protagonist who wanders alone in each room, trying to make sense of the narrative threads tangled through his days.  No, maybe not alone: there’s also the moon, looking in, and the voice of a poem slowly emerging.  I’ll gladly raise my cup to such companions.  

 

 

 

 

 

Red Letters 3.0

 

* 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:

steven.arlingtonlaureate@gmail.com

 

 

* 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 Twitter          

@StevenRatiner