Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene: Steven Cramer

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 #253

Two Poems from As If: Variations on Enrique Anderson-Imbert by Steven Cramer

History

His travel grant came through, so where should he go?

The Roaring 20s? The Enlightenment? The Renaissance?

Because he just turned forty, the Middle Ages maybe?

The morning suddenly went dark. When he looked up,

he expected to see clouds, with a remote hint of thunder.

Instead, he saw a giant hand draw back behind the sky,

as if unsure how to move on history’s chessboard: queen,

bishop, knight, rook, pawn? Or stay unmoved like the king?

In the spirit of this forthcoming poetry chapbook, As If––not to mention the Argentinian microcuentos (micro-stories) upon which the poems are based––please indulge my own fantasy: it’s a crowded gathering in the studio of poet/educator/translator/reader-par-excellence Steven Cramer. In one corner, Basho is serving tea to Emily Dickinson, murmuring provocatively. I believe that’s Rimbaud and Rainer Maria Rilke heatedly discussing ‘lyrical innovation’ with Eric Clapton, sipping from rather more potent libations. Huddled on the couch, laughing, Tomas Tranströmer is showing Philip Guston how to use a cell phone to search for ‘wild images.’ Such is the boisterous salon an hospitable poet like Steven maintains inside his cerebral parlor, entertaining all of the influences (artistic and otherwise) which, even after decades, remain formative for an always-evolving imagination. It’s the confluence of these disparate forces that makes this poet’s writing so unpredictable and engaging across seven poetry collections and innumerable essays. His last book, Departures from Rilke (Arrowsmith Press), attempted something rather unorthodox: he didn’t so much attempt ‘translations’ from Rilke’s Neue Gedichte/New Poems as he wholly reimagined them as contemporary texts––both responding to and transforming the originals by channeling them through his own life experience and out into the atmosphere of our 21st century American life. The work of both Rilke and Cramer felt enlarged by the experience.

Perhaps invigorated by that project––and the critical esteem it garnered––Steven began immersing himself in the microcuentos of Enrique Anderson-Imbert (1910-2000), South American fiction writer and scholar. He was intrigued by the unbridled nature of Anderson-Imbert’s vision which, sadly, did not often find an adequate representation in English translation. In the end, Steven selected twenty-one pieces from three collections of short fiction––and what was born originally as prose reemerges here as succinct lyric poems. As If, the chapbook that resulted, will be published by Lily Poetry Review Books sometime this September. In it, the poet has made sure that the playfulness and imaginative reach of the fiction remained intact; the poetry, while distinct, feels to me like a dream-cousin to the original. And so, in a poem like “History,” why shouldn’t the term ‘travel grant’ inspire a more far-reaching sabbatical journey than, say, a few weeks London or Rome? I love how Steven hints at the literary catalog many of us are still carrying inside our weary minds, decades after college. At first, we smile at the whimsical slide from the personal (“Because he just turned forty”) to the historical (visiting “the Middle Ages maybe?”) But when he follows that with: “The morning suddenly went dark,” it’s not unreasonable to hear a distant terza rima echoing in our ears––“Midway on our life’s journey/ I found myself in dark woods,/ the right road lost…”––and the stakes of this little fantasy are suddenly a bit more dire. Or, in another bit of mythic invention, we meet a decidedly more contemporary teenager in “Icarus” who is, nonetheless, still determined to expand his artistic reach. But is he some thrill-seeking hang glider who needs the possibility of plummeting in order to feel his own life as actual? Might the impulse also be to ensure the abiding attention of the parent who gives order to our universe? Or is the poet reminding us, in that final riven stanza, of something we understood in our youth but tend to forget within our older and more cushioned existence? That some radical surrender may be necessary (at least metaphorically) if we’re to finally step beyond the limitation of our bodies and know the universe from a wholly new vantage? Reading through this set of poems, I believe that Steven does indeed desire to chirrup with invented birdsong and to navigate ocean currents with the fish. His poetry reminds us that there are many more experiences, more guests to invite into our celebratory lives, than we’ve yet to imagine.

Icarus

Dad didn’t get my imagination

whenever I chirruped birdsongs,

broke into a trot during our walks,

or made like a whale vacuuming krill.

The last time we flew together,

I wanted the sun to melt the wax

fastening wings to my shoulders.

To feel how a fish breathes water,

I wanted to plunge into the sea.

The Red Letters

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and the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

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And coming soon:

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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 #158

Years ago, when I was fortunate enough to interview Mary Oliver, I asked about her early introduction to poetry. Because I felt I hadn’t experienced an inspirational poetry teacher until the middle of my college years, I wondered whether she’d been more fortunate. She explained that the school she attended in childhood had only the very best instructors: Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley – and she was its solitary student, assiduous and endlessly engaged with these voices of the honored dead.

I suspect Steven Cramer has matriculated at a similar academy. It’s hardly an uncommon trait among poets – attending to the long-gone voices of beloved writers as fervently as they do those of their husbands and wives – but Steven does more than maintain his avid dialogues with the past. He is willing to challenge his own consciousness with the demands of this rich tradition in which we writers aspire to participate. Case in point: this autumn, the always-daring Arrowsmith Press will publish this fine poet’s seventh collection, Departures From Rilke. Knowing Steven as both a writer and educator (he was the founding director of Lesley University’s MFA Creative Writing program), I was not surprised to experience, in the manuscript Steven shared, a kind of rigorous engagement with what’s generally considered Rainer Maria Rilke’s first great poetic achievement – the two volumes of Neue Gedichte (New Poems) of 1907 and 1908. But what exactly was the nature of what was being offered? They’re not really translations, at least not in the academic sense – though several come close and will certainly seem familiar to readers who’ve enjoyed any of the host of Rilke versions available. And they are more than imitations, that term that Robert Lowell used for his idiosyncratic English renderings from a host of European verse traditions. The poems here make me imagine that this is what Rilke might have composed had he been born in the US and been thoroughly conversant in the trends of contemporary poetics. Steven has stripped the originals of their archaic phrasing, their overabundance of adjectives and adverbs, so that each poem’s intention gains tremendous immediacy. But at their most intriguing, what we have are parallel worlds that Steven felt compelled to explore because of Rilke’s primary conceptions. And isn’t this what the poetry of a master demands from any student of his work? Steven carried Rilke – not from German into English – but from one consciousness into another, to breathe in our atmosphere.

So the original “Portrait of My Father as a Young Man” has morphed into “A Photograph of My Father’s Twin” – focusing instead on the uncle Steven never got the chance to know, a casualty of the Second World War. The power of the poem lies in more than its expected updates – ornamental braid replaced by ammunition pouches; saber hilt becoming a holstered pistol – but in what feels immediately at stake for both poets: the actuality of loss – that of the loved one, coupled with the loss of our very capacity to contain such absence. Steven grasps here not only his own darkening photograph, and not just the German poet’s dimming memory, but the very moment when we feel ourselves both defined by and inexorably subject to the authority of time. Is it a comfort, perhaps, that the words, the artistic images, endure beyond our mortal allotment? Perhaps that answer lies in the poem Rainer and Steven will prompt you and I to write.

A Photograph of My Father’s Twin

K.I.A., Anzio, January 26, 1944

The eyes dream; the forehead

seems to sense some far-off thing.

The mouth seduces without smiling.

Under the ammunition pouches,

one hand rests on a holster clipped

to its pistol belt; the other so at ease

it appears to vanish, as if the first

to grasp what’s waiting in the future.

Everything else about him lies hidden

in a sienna tint so deep, I can’t tell

who this disappearing soldier is.

The picture fades in my fading hand.

––Steven Cramer

The Red Letters 3.0