Flashback Friday: Red Letter Poem #5

  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:

Red Letter Poem #5

 

 

 

   

 

Lingua Franca


My language languishes:
it neither scampers nor frisks;
it executes no back-flips,
no handstands, no moonwalks;
it does not somersault; it does not pirouette;
it neither pounces like the cobra
nor springs like the yearling lamb.

I want that lithe and limber idiom,
that sassy brassy palaver,
that red-stiletto dialect,
that margarita-mother-tongue
with the salted rim,
spectacular vernacular,
slang with a bang;
I want blab, blurt, yawp, yelp,
hoot, howl, holler,
the lingua franca
of bump and tussle and nudge.

— Thomas DeFreitas



To Seamus Heaney’s way of thinking, poetry was about providing that “extra voltage in the language, the intensity, the self-consciousness” that raises thought to another level. Often, we experience that intensity through its sounds, its lyricism––and this is true even in contemporary poems that sometimes pose as normal speech. So it didn’t surprise me to learn that, when Thomas DeFreitas was 15 and he heard the great Irish poet read at Boston College, the event became a catalyst for him and helped make his love for poetry “all-consuming and irreversible.” An emerging talent, at work on his first full-length manuscript, Thomas’ writing has appeared in a number of journals like Dappled Things, Ibbetson Street, Muddy River Poetry Review, and Plainsongs. His desire for the richness and complexity of experience that words can bring to us is abundantly on display in this boisterous fanfare of a poem – the lingua franca, perhaps, with which all our roving hearts converse. . .



Or so said I back in 2020 when the Red Letters was a brand-new experiment, we were all walking around wearing surgical masks, wary of any human contact, and Thomas was making his first appearance in these electronic pages. A good deal has changed for the poet in the intervening years: he’s published three collections with Kelsay Books, the most recent being Swift River Ballad. A new title, Walking Between the Raindrops, is scheduled to appear later in 2025. His work has also been included in On and Off the Road: Poems of New Hampshire (from the Peterborough Poetry Project.) Though his more recent poetry (several examples of which have appeared in other RL installments) reveals a ripening of his vision and his skills, I’m impressed that the exuberance of the fifteen-year-old literary acolyte––who was thrilled by the cerebral and musical possibilities he experienced in Heaney’s performance––is very much present in his work today. And these days, when the headlines bring us a continual supply of distressing news, I thought we all might savor a little burst of linguistic delight.

 

 

 

 

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

 

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

Red Letter Poem #234

  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 #234

 

 

 

where the words come from

my prayer

is cold sunlight

on forsythia



as the cooke’s hollow brook

burbles and gushes

in the background



as a lone sparrow

bounces along

hard new england soil



like the consonants

in the verb pipiabat

(pipe and chirrup



of his lover’s pet

in that poem

by catullus)



my prayer

is the slouch and slack

of sleepless nights



at the laptop

as i write to a friend

and wonder



where the words come from

––Thomas DeFreitas

I’ll bite: where do words come from? Language––and especially the source of inspired utterance––is at the heart of a perennial mystery; writers endlessly invent new ways to fan the flames of those creative speculations. Of course, since they explore the question within poems and stories, composed of that very linguistic magic, any potential answer will require of us a leap of the imagination. The query, today, is prompted by the title of this new poem from Thomas DeFreitas. Of course, the simple answer is: we don’t really know. And, in fact, many poets profess a desire not to know, fearing perhaps that too careful a psychological or sociological investigation might short-circuit the very processes upon which their work (and happiness) depend. It’s safer, perhaps, to deflect attention toward the ancient idea of an external Muse, a goddess who might occasionally respond to our entreaties while remaining resolutely beyond understanding. Still, I enjoyed investigating the mindset of Thomas’ vivid little text, teasing out some of its insights. Like any good Greek or Roman poet, his poem begins with a kind of a supplication; then it makes its way from the cold sun of a New England landscape to the late-night eruption of song.



This fellow-Arlingtonian poet listens attentively as “cooke’s hollow brook/ burbles and gushes/ in the background”––and, unsurprisingly, his verse bubbles up with similar rhythms and alliterative energy. So perhaps that’s part of the answer we’re seeking: language is an echo of the natural world, an effort to converse with all the beings on this planet (living and otherwise.) Then, fittingly, the speaker notices a lone sparrow hopping along the hard New England soil––and suddenly he remembers a verse from Catullus, one of ancient Rome’s best-known and most-loved poets. One well-known lyric is about the death of his beloved’s pet sparrow; Ad solam dominam usque pipiabat–– “It was chirping constantly to its mistress alone.” Such poems were part of a venerable tradition, writing about the death of a sweetheart’s pet––a way for writers to address their own passionate response to the lover’s emotional turmoil and their own. But modern scholars suggest that Catullus (a master of double-entendre and sexual innuendo) might be using the little bird as a stand-in for, shall we say, that delicate organ of desire (“sweet as honey,” he says of the sparrow which never “moved from that girl’s lap.”) So perhaps that’s the word-source in question: the upsurge of sexual energy––the need for pleasure coupled with the longing to be blessed by new life. But Thomas takes this a step further: the bird “bounces along. . .like the consonants/ in the verb pipiabat”––and these rhythmic and tonal qualities seem to be part of the essential makeup of articulation. (Likely you noticed how our poet can’t resist imitating the Latinate music with his “pipe and chirrup.”) Maybe language and music are intertwined, and both hardwired into consciousness. This can’t help but connect us to our most ancient lineage, to all who’ve walked this earth and spoken of our mortal joys and sorrows.



Thomas has already appeared a number of times in these electronic pages. His three previous poetry collections have all been published by Kelsay Books, the most recent being Swift River Ballad. A new book, Walking Between the Raindrops, is scheduled to appear in 2025 and will contain today’s featured poem. His work has also been included in On and Off the Road: Poems of New Hampshire (from the Peterborough Poetry Project) and the 2017 Poetry Marathon Anthology. I admire how, in Thomas’ books, he finds a way to incorporate everything from intimate longing to youthful rebellion to the deepest of spiritual questions. But one more thing needs mentioning––and it’s how today’s poem moves toward its resolution: Thomas sees poetry as essential human connection. And just as Catullus directs his hymn to his longed-for Clodia, Thomas concludes this poem––laptop clacking beneath fingertips––by directing his words to a distant friend. The hope is, perhaps, that words will keep love’s bond from shattering, despite distance; if the impulse to speak the heart’s truth sustained Catullus, perhaps it will do the same for us––if we’ve honored the commitment to listen as carefully as we speak.

 

 

 

 

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

The Book of Shores by Mary Buchinger

 

The Book of Shores by Mary Buchinger 

Lily Poetry Review Press, 2024, 102 pp.

reviewed by Thomas DeFreitas

The late American poet Donald Justice once offered his opinion that American poets fall into one of two “camps”: the Walt Whitman camp and the Emily Dickinson camp. Whitman-poets are marked by their rambunctious, capacious inclusivity, their embracing acceptance of everything from stamen to stevedore, from wisteria to winebibber. Dickinson-poets are marked by cadence and deliberation, by a discriminating selectivity, by the understated emphasis on one or two painstakingly chosen things. (Justice himself professed a preference for Dickinson's “closed room.”)

In The Book of Shores, and elsewhere, it is Mary Buchinger's good fortune to have united these two opposite tendencies in one glorious aesthetic: yes, there is thoughtful, measured pacing; there are words carefully chosen, a luminous attention to the “minute particulars” (as Blake called them); but there is also expansion and invitation, there is acceptance of all material as poetically valid and vivid, there is the conscious capacity to admit and welcome the domestic vignette, the surreal and dream-like moment, and the globally pertinent “statement.”

The form of The Book of Shores will be familiar to those who have read Buchinger’s Virology, her long poem alert to pandemic realities. Shores falls into seven “chapters”: Seaway, Island, Peninsula, Archipelago, Strait, [INLAND], and Continent. Each section is a chain of much smaller poems, exquisite and intricate lyrics, connected and separated by an asterisk or some other form of punctuation, as we find in Robert Creeley’s seminal book Pieces.

Careful observation marks each turn and twist of the word-flow, where “cumulus snags / the upper branches / of an invisible tree”; where “the smallest pieces of meaning” are not neglected; where Buchinger’s eye takes in “nets and knots of cloud / figment and fragment.” There is alertness to the animal world, be it a tawny spider in the sleeve of a bathrobe, a surprise for the narrator at her morning tea, or the cat whose “compact coil” in the speaker’s lap “thrums with warmth.”

In “Peninsula” Buchinger alludes to the semicolon as a symbol of mental-health awareness. “It demonstrates," she tells us in her Notes, “continuation with a new beginning as opposed to the finality of a period.” Or as the poem phrases it, “it signifies a decision / to not end.” One sees kinship with Buchinger’s method: after each asterisk or semicolon, a fresh start, a new “independent clause” of poetry, shining and graspable, luminous and within reach.

“Sometimes,” the narrator concedes, “I feel ready to excise and renew” (in sympathy with a friend who had “cancelled” her own past), but memory is tenacious, perhaps especially in “Archipelago,” where the imagery ranges from a child of some decades ago watching Sears catalogs incinerate in a barrel, to a poet of this moment as she is nagged by the small dings of her mobile phone. We feel as if we are reading “remnants of a great lecture” where the parts are of vital importance, as in dreams, but the larger themes are left implicit (as in dreams!). We have hymnody educed from drooping flower-petals; we have the archipelago as “crowd-funded geography.” In a sentence that Whitman could have written, “I wake to the history / of my body, each day / another jotting.” 

In “Strait,” the narrator admits that the “mother tongue” she speaks can sound “foreign”; she speaks further of “translation / from one language to another / feeling into word.” But Buchinger’s alertness and unswerving purpose makes these translations as palpable and handy as the weight of a necklace “lodged / in the linty corner / of my winter jacket.” Walking through this section, we have the poet in sandals that are pretty but which draw blood; the poet’s aging mother walking “like a penguin”; and a concert attendee leaving a performance of Buxtehude in a rush: “the stranger’s sudden departure / changes what I hear.”

The section called “INLAND” finds Buchinger as anthologist of startlements and surprises, even of shocks. We have “stakes of herons / stately in ebbtide”; “an ankle-deep sea / of economy”; “a shiny miry / mirror / of sun.” We have the beauty of the Self “who carried the sea wherever she went”; INLAND as “a skiffless interior” with “a stillborn moon … incubator / of storm & misdirection.” Rhymes are discovered: “aghast” with “a guest”; “nest algae” with “nostalgia.” The narrator dusts a moose’s skull, its “white machinery / of ovals and holes”; “to look into this moose’s eyes / I’d have to enter the earth.” The poet gives us nature red in tooth and claw, as an Eagle (she capitalizes its name, as one might the Grim Reaper’s!) swoops and assaults a fawn.

In the coda called “Continent,” Buchinger ponders “the green … fields” of her manuscript, “its hungry regions and mossy passages” and expresses the belief that “possibility dwells within its rifts.” There is much in The Book of Shores that this reviewer finds to be challenging, moments and occasions that linger on the outskirts of comprehension. But there is far more that invites, that spurs us to plunge in. There are surprises waiting in the reeds and the bulrushes. Buchinger urges us always to seek, as we will surely find.