Red Letter Poem #209

  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

 

 

 

 

 

As most of you have heard, this Sunday will begin the culminating summer of the WE (too) THE PEOPLE poetry series, created by by the New England Poetry Club and the Longfellow Historical House.  If you want to learn more, here’s a link to the page highlighting that program:   https://nepoetryclub.org/we-too-the-people/

 

Wearing my other hat as NEPC president, I am working to iron out last-minute arrangements for the event and writing the introductions.  So let me offer a Flashback Friday Red Letter this week instead of a new installment.  WE (too)… kicked off last summer with a reading by a Former US Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky––and we are fortunate enough to have another to start this year’s program, the wonderful Tracy K. Smith.  If you live in the Boston area, I hope to meet many of you there on Sunday (but, for those at a distance, videos of each WE (too)… event will be posted two days afterward).  Here’s one of my favorite Red Letters featuring a poem from Robert’s new collection––one that echoes the theme of the WE (too) events: affirming that a diversity of voices is essential to the vitality of our culture.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Flashback Friday:

Red Letter Poem #209

 

 

 

 

Branca  

 

 

Ralph Branca was the fifteenth of seventeen children.

This poem is not the poem of “the speaker.”

 

His father was an immigrant from Calabria.

These words are those of Robert Pinsky. Speaking.

 

Branca wore Dodger uniform number 13.

“Speaking” is the punch line of a Jewish joke.

 

Some Romans call Calabrians “Africani.”

Brooklyn had its own daily, the Brooklyn Eagle.

 

At eighty-five Branca learned about his mother.

He was twenty-one when Robinson joined the Dodgers.

 

At eleven I loved Robinson for his daring

Running the bases. Stealing home. His fire.

 

Branca was one of the few who befriended him.

I was too young to understand his mission

 

The fuel of that dancing to taunt the pitcher.

Robinson never forgot Branca’s kindness.

 

What the old man found out about his mother

Is she was born a Jew in Hungary. Kati.

 

After he gave up the most famous home run ever,

Back in the clubhouse Branca lay weeping face down.

 

Kati gave birth to seventeen Catholic children.

The Giants won the pennant. 1951.

 

Branca means “claw,” a fit name for a pitcher.

His teammates thought it best that he cry alone,

 

But “Only my dear friend Jackie, who knew me so well,

Came over and put his arm around my shoulder.”

 

The Nazis killed the aunts and uncles Branca

Didn’t know existed until he was old.

 

42 in itself a nothing of a number.

The Dodgers traded Branca to the Tigers.

 

Grief: with its countless different ways and strains.

Glory: a greater thing than success, but slower.

 

Some of the Tigers who had been Giants explained

To Branca how the Giants had stolen the signs

 

From opposition catchers.  The telescope

In center field. Wires, buzzers. Branca chose not

 

To talk about it.  It’s all in Prager’s book.

His research unearthed Kati, those aunts and uncles.

 

The Dodgers were taken from Brooklyn by their owner:

I, Robert Pinsky, choose not to say his name.

 

I didn’t live in Brooklyn but I knew the score.

I knew it was a kind of underdog place.

 

Nowadays once a year all Major Leaguers

Wear Jackie Robinson’s number 42.

 

In the joke, the person who answers the telephone

At Goldberg, Goldberg and Goldberg keeps replying

 

That Goldberg is out of the office. And so is Goldberg.

“Alright, then let me talk to Goldberg.” “Speaking.”

 

Robinson spoke to Branca: “Without you”

He said, “We never could have made it this far.”

 

 

                                      ––Robert Pinsky

 

 

 

“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns.”  With this intriguing line, Homer introduces his famed protagonist, Odysseus; but, had the bard been born in a later time, he might have said much the same invoking Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher, Ralph Branca (especially if he’d ever attempted to hit his curve ball.)  Branca was a three-time All-Star whose dozen years in the Majors were completely overshadowed when he gave up a single fateful hit––baseball’s famous “Shot Heard ‘Round the World.”  Coming into the decisive game of the National League Pennant race––October 3^rd, 1951 at the New York Giant’s old Polo Grounds, ninth inning, with his team nursing a 4-2 lead––Branca gave up a three-run walk-off homer to Bobby Thomson, bringing his team’s glorious season to ruin and breaking hearts from Greenpoint to Sheepshead Bay. 

 

Aristocratic men in ancient Greece lived by the code of kleos, or “fame”, aiming to crown their names with the renown of a great warrior, while bringing honor to the tribe.  Again, not so very different from the situation of those baseball players back in the Forties and Fifties––way before today’s age of massive contracts for even mediocre talents.  To other New Yorkers, Brooklyn was seen as something of a tribal enclave who heartily embraced their ‘neighborhood team’––as I often heard from my father when I was small.  He’d tell me how he remembered sitting on his front stoop in Flatbush and seeing the owner of the Dodgers (I’ll respect the poet’s wishes and leave him nameless), strolling along giving out bleacher tickets to the local kids.  Life can often be unfair, and Branca’s name, if it’s remembered at all, is forever associated with defeat because of a single fastball.  Yet America’s bard, Robert Pinsky sings the praises of this good man whose faith and moral character were their own form of triumph.  One example: on opening day in 1947—which marked the major league debut of Jackie Robinson, baseball’s first player of Color—Branca lined up on the field beside Robinson, when all other players refused.  It took some courage to stand up for what was simply right, and a friendship quickly grew from it.  And so, in this poem from Robert’s eleventh collection, Proverbs of Limbo, (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), his couplets unscroll deliberately slow, offering us their refracted meditation on honor, identity, and the private and civic experiences to which poetry remains an essential response.  The piece is a sly intermixing of remembered events, curious bits of biography, and even a corny joke; and only as we readers immerse ourselves in the poem, do the elements coalesce into a more unified vision, mirroring perhaps how the multi-faceted mind pieces together its reality.  The poem provides us with some insight into where we are today in our American journey, and what’s enabled us (as the poet phrased it in that concluding line) to make it this far. 

 

Robert has earned his own version of kleos, working as a poet, essayist, educator, and three-term United States Poet Laureate.  And, for goodness sakes, how many poets have on their resumé an appearance in an episode of The Simpsons?!  Fame indeed!  That attests to his public profile which he’s used again and again to herald poetry’s essential role in our cultural wellbeing.  Forty-five years ago, Robert published his book-length poem An Explanation of America, crafted as an elaborate letter to his daughter concerning the world she was entering.  Near the conclusion he writes: “If I could sail forward to see the streets/ Of that strange country where you will live past me,/ Or further even by a hundred years;/ And walk those pavements with my phantom steps. . .my courage/ Would fail, I think: best not to mount the steps/ Where I could leave no footprint in the snow…”.  It is fortifying to both poet and reader that such imaginative courage carries him onward, and his explanations of the tortuous American mythology continue––speech directed toward that unimaginable future.  And those footprints in the snow––they’ll belong to newcomers who are still carrying poems like this one.

 

 

 

 

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:

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

 

* The weekly installment is also available at

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 visit the Red Letter archives at: https://StevenRatiner.com/category/red-letters/

New England Poetry Club: We, (too) The People

 

I am on the board of the New England Poetry Club and I want to let you know about this wonderful series we have coming up this summer.. Such poets as Robert Pinsky, Richard Blanco, Diannely Antigua, and Stephanie Burt--will read from their work at the LONGFELLOW HOUSE in Cambridge, Ma.  Our first event is July 6th with former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky. The events will start at 3PM on the Longfellow House lawn.  For more info go to:     

https://nepoetryclub.org/we-too-the-people/

We (too) The People

NEPC is proud to feature a series of events featuring some of the most acclaimed voices in American poetry.

It’s the sweetest poetic phrase in American democracy: “We the People.” It is confounding, then, that some, in recent days, aim to limit the inclusive vision of what we are and to narrowly redefine American culture.

To explore the diversity of voices and visions in contemporary poetry—and to begin celebrating the 250th anniversary of our great democratic experiment—we are producing WE (too) THE PEOPLE—eight poetry programs across Summer 2025 and 2026.

The New England Poetry Club is collaborating with the Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters and their Friends organization to invite some of the most acclaimed names in American poetry to bring their voices to this special program. Taken together, the work of these literary artists will offer a dynamic vision of our country and its people, our shared history, and imaginative reach.

The readings will be presented, free and open to the public, on the lawn at the Longfellow House on four summer Sundays each year—and, for the first time, will be live-streamed so that audiences from across the country will be able to join us. In addition, the edited recordings of these events will eventually be made available to anyone who wishes to explore the contemporary literary landscape and consider how poetry, as a primary historical resource, can illuminate discussions of civil society and deepen our historical understanding.

Study guides will be prepared so that schools across the country can use these materials in the classroom.

The Organizing Music in Robert Pinsky’s poem ‘Branca’

 

A Handpicked Poem

by Michael Todd Steffen

The Organizing Music in Robert Pinsky’s poem ‘Branca’

Who the heck is Ralph Branca? Well, as baseball fans (and there are poets among this group) may know, Branca was a not bad, not bad at all pitcher in the Major Leagues between 1944 and 1956, with the Brooklyn Dodgers, the Detroit Tigers, and finally with the New York Yankees. The specific moment of Branca’s career that still registers with us is that he gave up the game-winning homerun to Bobby Thompson of the New York Giants in a 1951 playoff game, and that hit became known as The Miracle of Coogan’s Bluff, and also as The Shot Heard Around the World

The poem is not merely about defeat and failure, it’s about widely-witnessed and soul-crushing defeat and failure.

After he gave up the most famous homerun ever,

Back in the clubhouse Branca lay weeping, face down.

The poem appears in Pinsky’s most recent collection Proverbs of Limbo, published last June (2024) by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

It is a poem typically rife with subjects for discussion. I just wanted to make this one note about the stunning topical variety of the poem and how its immediate appearance of random organization, which keeps us on the edge of our seats as we read, still maintains our trust with its rhythmical consistency. Life is crazy, we need something to hang onto. Kids prepare to confront crazy love and mortality with poetry:

Ring around the rosies,

Pocket full of posies,

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

Similarly the poem ‘Branca’ conjures life’s falls, with a dazzling variety of facts about Ralph Branca, importantly as to his identity as a human being associated with so much more than that moment of failure which has been etched in history, or baseball lore. The poet will also take the opportunity to make statements about himself in the ramble of his data:

His father was an immigrant from Calabria.

These words are those of Robert Pinsky. Speaking.

Why these two pieces of information are joined in the same couplet? Seemingly for no reason at all, and there’s a great indulgence these days of being unburdened by reason or coherence. However, the two do go quite profoundly together, as they each evoke origin of the man, his father of the biological Ralph Branca, Robert Pinsky as another, different source of Ralph Branca in the poem itself which will extend and expand on the pitcher’s living repute as a man, in details, much more than just the notorious baseball pitcher, otherwise diminished to a needle of failure in the haystack of historical addenda.

When we read through the poem, we notice an end-line or “heroic” based versification, with the little hiccup, in most of the lines, of a dactyl or anapest (however you score it)—

Branca wore Dodger uniform number 13.

Speaking is the punchline of a Jewish joke.

Some Romans call Calabrians “Africani.”

Brooklyn has its own daily, the Brooklyn Eagle.

At eighty-five Branca learned about his mother.

He was twenty-one when Robinson joined the Dodgers…

That versification holds the very remote and difficult associations between the two lines of each couplet stable, so to speak, and keeps us going along with it even as we’re wondering, perhaps squirming, about the sense of the organization or logic of the poem, however our nature to just swallow language. Again, as poets and readers of poetry, it can be a gimme to revel in madness. But if folks are going to start talking about the poem, that is if the poem is to stand a chance to stay with us, in memory, as Branca himself somewhat obscurely has, we need to find sense in it. The editors of The New Yorker found sense enough to publish it in March 2017.

The music or prosody of the Greek-ish lines begins to work on us subconsciously as a sort of coherence. When we look closer, associations emerge: unlucky number 13 and the (mortal) laugh in a joke; a Roman colloquialism and a town’s daily journal both vehicles of hearsay or facts; late in life “At eighty-five” balanced with early career “He was twenty-one”…

The poem will be the challenge and subject of this week’s poetry discussion forum Let’s Talk About a Poem hosted by Somerville Poet Laureate Lloyd Schwartz via Zoom, on Saturday April 12 at 11a.m. Robert Pinsky will be “there” to read ‘Branca’ and take part in the discussion. For more information and a link to join, contact Marita Coombs at maldencirc@gmail.com.

Red Letter Poem #209

 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 #209

 

 

 

 

 

Branca  

 

 

Ralph Branca was the fifteenth of seventeen children.

This poem is not the poem of “the speaker.”

 

His father was an immigrant from Calabria.

These words are those of Robert Pinsky. Speaking.

 

Branca wore Dodger uniform number 13.

“Speaking” is the punch line of a Jewish joke.

 

Some Romans call Calabrians “Africani.”

Brooklyn had its own daily, the Brooklyn Eagle.

 

At eighty-five Branca learned about his mother.

He was twenty-one when Robinson joined the Dodgers.

 

At eleven I loved Robinson for his daring

Running the bases. Stealing home. His fire.

 

Branca was one of the few who befriended him.

I was too young to understand his mission

 

The fuel of that dancing to taunt the pitcher.

Robinson never forgot Branca’s kindness.

 

What the old man found out about his mother

Is she was born a Jew in Hungary. Kati.

 

After he gave up the most famous home run ever,

Back in the clubhouse Branca lay weeping face down.

 

Kati gave birth to seventeen Catholic children.

The Giants won the pennant. 1951.

 

Branca means “claw,” a fit name for a pitcher.

His teammates thought it best that he cry alone,

 

But “Only my dear friend Jackie, who knew me so well,

Came over and put his arm around my shoulder.”

 

The Nazis killed the aunts and uncles Branca

Didn’t know existed until he was old.

 

42 in itself a nothing of a number.

The Dodgers traded Branca to the Tigers.

 

Grief: with its countless different ways and strains.

Glory: a greater thing than success, but slower.

 

Some of the Tigers who had been Giants explained

To Branca how the Giants had stolen the signs

 

From opposition catchers.  The telescope

In center field. Wires, buzzers. Branca chose not

 

To talk about it.  It’s all in Prager’s book.

His research unearthed Kati, those aunts and uncles.

 

The Dodgers were taken from Brooklyn by their owner:

I, Robert Pinsky, choose not to say his name.

 

I didn’t live in Brooklyn but I knew the score.

I knew it was a kind of underdog place.

 

Nowadays once a year all Major Leaguers

Wear Jackie Robinson’s number 42.

 

In the joke, the person who answers the telephone

At Goldberg, Goldberg and Goldberg keeps replying

 

That Goldberg is out of the office. And so is Goldberg.

“Alright, then let me talk to Goldberg.” “Speaking.”

 

Robinson spoke to Branca: “Without you”

He said, “We never could have made it this far.”

 

 

                                  ––Robert Pinsky

 

 

 

“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns.”  With this intriguing line, Homer introduces his famed protagonist, Odysseus; but, had the bard been born in a later time, he might have said much the same invoking Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher, Ralph Branca (especially if he’d ever attempted to hit his curve ball.)  Branca was a three-time All-Star whose dozen years in the Majors were completely overshadowed when he gave up a single fateful hit––baseball’s famous “Shot Heard ‘Round the World.”  Coming into the decisive game of the National League Pennant race––October 3^rd, 1951 at the New York Giant’s old Polo Grounds, ninth inning, with his team nursing a 4-2 lead––Branca gave up a three-run walk-off homer to Bobby Thomson, bringing his team’s glorious season to ruin and breaking hearts from Greenpoint to Sheepshead Bay. 

 

Aristocratic men in ancient Greece lived by the code of kleos, or “fame”, aiming to crown their names with the renown of a great warrior, while bringing honor to the tribe.  Again, not so very different from the situation of those baseball players back in the Forties and Fifties––way before today’s age of massive contracts for even mediocre talents.  To other New Yorkers, Brooklyn was seen as something of a tribal enclave who heartily embraced their ‘neighborhood team’––as I often heard from my father when I was small.  He’d tell me how he remembered sitting on his front stoop in Flatbush and seeing the owner of the Dodgers (I’ll respect the poet’s wishes and leave him nameless), strolling along giving out bleacher tickets to the local kids.  Life can often be unfair, and Branca’s name, if it’s remembered at all, is forever associated with defeat because of a single fastball.  Yet America’s bard, Robert Pinsky sings the praises of this good man whose faith and moral character were their own form of triumph.  One example: on opening day in 1947—which marked the major league debut of Jackie Robinson, baseball’s first player of Color—Branca lined up on the field beside Robinson, when all other players refused.  It took some courage to stand up for what was simply right, and a friendship quickly grew from it.  And so, in this poem from Robert’s about-to-be published eleventh collection, Proverbs of Limbo, (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), his couplets unscroll deliberately slow, offering us their refracted meditation on honor, identity, and the private and civic experiences to which poetry remains an essential response.  The piece is a sly intermixing of remembered events, curious bits of biography, and even a corny joke; and only as we readers immerse ourselves in the poem, do the elements coalesce into a more unified vision, mirroring perhaps how the multi-faceted mind pieces together its reality.  The poem provides us with some insight into where we are today in our American journey, and what’s enabled us (as the poet phrased it in that concluding line) to make it this far. 

 

Robert has earned his own version of kleos, working as a poet, essayist, educator, and three-term United States Poet Laureate.  And, for goodness sakes, how many poets have on their resumé an appearance in an episode of The Simpsons?!  Fame indeed!  That attests to his public profile which he’s used again and again to herald poetry’s essential role in our cultural wellbeing.  Forty-five years ago, Robert published his book-length poem An Explanation of America, crafted as an elaborate letter to his daughter concerning the world she was entering.  Near the conclusion he writes: “If I could sail forward to see the streets/ Of that strange country where you will live past me,/ Or further even by a hundred years;/ And walk those pavements with my phantom steps. . .my courage/ Would fail, I think: best not to mount the steps/ Where I could leave no footprint in the snow…”.  It is fortifying to both poet and reader that such imaginative courage carries him onward, and his explanations of the tortuous American mythology continue––speech directed toward that unimaginable future.  And those footprints in the snow––they’ll belong to newcomers who are still carrying poems like this one.

 

 

 

 

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