Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene: Wendy Drexler

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 #287

In the Kitchen

I know what you’re looking for, standing there,

holding the orange juice carton in your hand.

I see ^ watch you open the cabinet with our

coffee mugs, then turn, pondering, in the center

of the kitchen. I’ve struck out see and inserted

watch—I’m on watch here, a watchwoman

pacing the figurative ramparts, watching

and wanting to insert a little caret of ease

into the sinkhole of your hesitation.

The glasses are over there, in the cabinet

to the right of the sink, I say, shrinking my voice

to the size of a seed so my tone will seem

anecdotal, incidental, nondirective, inflected

with an orchard of kindness. This time,

my words go down smoothly, you thank me,

walk to the right cabinet, take out a glass.

You pour your juice, and I stand there,

watching you do what you still can.

----Wendy Drexler

Modulation. The way––through boundless revisions––a poet calibrates a poem’s diction, tone of voice, rhythmic force, word choice and, its corollary, the potency of what remains unsaid. Typically, readers are drawn to the unique styles with which poets speak onto the page; but after several readings, we may realize how powerfully we are moved by what was left unarticulated. Our minds, then, are drawn into that void to fully substantiate the unscrolling vision, becoming a necessary element in the completion of the poem. And in this process, we make the poem ours, a vehicle for our own intimate discoveries. The subject matter of Wendy Drexler’s new poem is heart-shaking––there’s little doubt in that. But its most dramatic effects come from the ways she’s used these subtle inflections to coax us to a place many of us have not yet had to confront. Quietly, our illusion of control is being laid bare. The unassailable experience of reality suddenly trembles. Dementia involves the gradual loss of someone we love, well before the body itself is failing, facing departure. From the first line of this poem––“I know what you’re looking for,”––we are standing in a place where certainty and doubt are in contention. Wendy’s husband, Herb, was a brilliant individual with advanced degrees from both MIT and Harvard. He spent his work-life as an adoption lawyer and helped found what’s now called the Academy of Adoption & Assisted Reproduction Attorneys. The insidiousness of Alzheimer’s lies in its slow erosion of an intricate mind created over many decades. In this poem, we sense how her husband’s illness is gradually remaking the poet’s experience as well, from a loving wife into Herb’s vigilant caretaker. How painful, seeing him standing in his own kitchen with the carton of juice in one hand and the empty one searching––not simply for a glass, or the word that maps its meaning––but for the simple calm that once signified home.

We are a little startled to read: “I see ^ watch you open the cabinet”––and suddenly we have slipped from the actual kitchen to the literary territory where we use inky syllables to comprehend our complex situation. “I’ve struck out see and inserted/ watch—I’m on watch here, a watchwoman// pacing the figurative ramparts…”. And now we find our sympathies shifting, enlarging: from the husband’s confusion to that of the poet/narrator who––in a mood that combines necessity and desperation––has already begun carrying the moment over into verse, into a realm where she still has some measure of control (ah, those modest little couplets!) And how she wishes she could do more ––“to insert a little caret of ease/ into the sinkhole of your hesitation”–– but there is only so much that is possible. She can, of course, answer her husband’s unspoken question (‘what is it I’m looking for?’)––but more importantly, she can modulate her manner, the style of her speaking (“shrinking my voice/ to the size of a seed”) to try to keep this proud man from feeling still further diminished by what has taken possession of his life. And we can feel how that vast unsaid impacts the scene, deepens our understanding––“This time,// my words go down smoothly…”. This time. And we are forced to imagine what those other times might be like, torn by rage and fear, both husband and wife clinging to the debris of a remembered life that’s been stoved in by the storm.

Wendy, a poet and educator, is about to publish her fourth collection, Harvest of What Remains (Lily Poetry Review Books) which explores the situation of Alzheimer’s and its effect on the whole circle of relationship. In 2022, she was honored with an artist’s fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her poems have appeared in dozens of fine print journals including The Threepenny Review, Salamander, and Prairie Schooner––and over the airwaves on sites like Verse Daily and WBUR radio’s ‘Cognoscenti.’ I return to her work often, valuing the mixture of creative rigor and emotional intelligence, a hallmark of the best of poetry. In this new book, we share her experience of fighting a calamitous battle where we know, from the outset, that the stakes are dire and the outcome fated. Still, this is precisely what Frost intended when he spoke of poetry as “a momentary stay against confusion.” For a little while, we can set our minds to the task of ordering, clarifying, unveiling our inner circumstance––raising a verbal roof beneath which we can seek shelter. It is a fortifying, even enlightening practice. And then we can return to our marvelous, heartbreaking, unruly outer lives, trying hard to savor what’s been given, what’s being lost.

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 #197

Under the Overpass Off the 405 North

After I’d claimed my suitcase from the rumble

of the rotating carousel at LAX, after I’d caught

the Flyaway bus and we’d barreled into the smog

and wall-to-wall on the 405 North, after the exit ramp

curving down and around it, for just a second

I saw them, they were like three farmers tilling a field,

two men from the highway maintenance crew

in orange reflective vests cropping a patch of grass

with rotating trimmers and a third man paring the slope—

you couldn’t call it a garden, it was sparse and not

particularly beautiful, a few trees, a bird or two

probably chirping as we drove by—but it was as if

the part of me that had shut down and grown numb

had swallowed a shot of ginger with turmeric—

in less time than it takes to write less time, I was

revived by this nearly eye-to-eye respite from greed

and speed and need—and sure, this was just a job

and likely doesn’t pay well, and I bet those vests

are itchy in the heat, these men eager for their break

or the end of their shift, but they were trimming

the weeds with whirling blades that seemed as tender

as a barber’s shaver shearing the nape of a man’s neck,

and I'm preserving this scene as if it were hoshagaki,

those Japanese dried persimmons which I just misspelled

as permission, I’m letting the sugar crystallize and bloom

into the orange vests the three men were wearing,

I’m letting myself pasture in a patch of earth, a little

tended, a little mended, in the bend of a highway.

––Wendy Drexler

Our flight was delayed and––after a long tiring day of crowded terminals and TSA scrutiny; after the jumble of baggage carousels and airport traffic––my wife and I arrived home late last night, tumbled into bed, and were almost instantly asleep. I found myself subsumed by the sorts of dreams that tend to be instigated by travel, changes of scenery, dramatic shifts in perception. Such visions can’t help but reflect the neural overload that comes as a kind of package deal with the privilege of modern-day possibility. And that word led me back to Wendy Drexler’s new poem and the notion I feel simmering at its heart: possibility––those unexpected worlds that the imagination uncovers in the interstices between one ordinary moment and the next. Her poem seems to me almost overflowing with language and observation, barely pausing to catch its breath; it’s as if the speaker’s mind, buffeted by the world’s tumult, is trying desperately to latch onto some thought that will keep it safely afloat. And so possibility becomes coupled with play––that irrepressible urge to tinker with or repurpose what the day is presenting to us. And wasn’t it delightful to feel our own minds bouncing along in the wake of the poet’s, one playful phrase bubbling into the next? Simple terms seem suddenly suggestive, even mysterious––and what would you expect when (as the title states) you find yourself “under” the “over”, a weary passenger on the “Flyaway” bus? What “claim” can we make on this or any day? How did we wind up on this carnival “carousel” in the first place? And if we’re willing to entrust our fate to this momentum, where in the world will it take us?

But, in the nick of time, the mind does secure its ballast in the form of that little faux-pastorale glimpsed beside the highway exit: “farmers” who turn out to be, not some Wordsworthian vision, but a road crew hacking at the overgrowth. Oh, but the unexpected “tenderness” of those whirling weed trimmers! And the orange reflective vests that remind the poet of dried persimmons––a fruit that, unsurprisingly, brings to mind Japanese New Year celebrations, symbols of good luck and longevity. And that, in turn, prompts me to revisit artists like Hokusai and Sakai Hōitsu who have used the humble persimmon to demonstrate how a simple image can indeed become an exquisite refuge of the mind. But Wendy is not through––and by this point she must be engaged in writing (or typing) her poem, because a slip of the fingers (or perhaps the mischievous auto-correct) turned persimmon into permission. Yes, another in a string of lovely ‘p’ words: possibility, play, persimmon, and the unbridled imagination granting us permission to savor this moment of unconventional beauty. As an older poet once wrote: “The world is too much with us”––and having “given our hearts away”, we must act to reclaim them. Wendy invites us into the pasture of this enticing moment, lush with musical language––and we feel soothed by it, here in a bend in the highway we’re traveling on together (even if our paths have never crossed.)

Wendy is the author of four collections of poetry––the most recent being Notes from the Column of Memory (Terrapin Books)––and, in 2022, was awarded an artist fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her work has appeared in dozens of fine journals including The Threepenny Review, Salamander, and Prairie Schooner––and featured on the Verse Daily site and WBUR’s Cognoscenti. Between 2018 and 2023, she served as the poet-in-residence at New Mission High School in Hyde Park, MA. She is also the Programming Co-Chair for the venerable New England Poetry Club. And to this list, I must add that the poet would seem to be a most pleasing traveling partner; never a dull moment when the heart is attentive and the mind is alive.

Red Letters 3.0