The Red Letter Poem Project: Featuring Doug Holder

 ***This is sponsored by the Arlington, Ma. Council of the Arts, and written by Steve Ratiner--Arlington Poet Laureate...... Ratiner founded this program, and many fine poets have appeared here..

                                        *****************************

  I was asked to write an essay for Askold Melnyczuk’s Arrowsmith Journal about what I learned from the first year of the Red Letter Project.  It also became a meditation about the relationship between poet and reader.  If you’d like to take a look, here is a link –

https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/community-of-voices

-- and you’ll also be able to check out the variety of marvelous literary projects that appear under Askold’s Arrowsmith imprint.  Enjoy!

 

The Red Letter Poem Project

 

The Red Letters 3.0: A New Beginning (Perhaps)   

At the outset of the Covid pandemic, when fear was at its highest, the Red Letter Project was intended to remind us of community: that, even isolated in our separate homes, we could still face this challenge together.  As Arlington’s Poet Laureate, I began sending out a poem of comfort each Friday, featuring the fine talents from our town and its neighbors.  Because I enlisted the partnership of seven local arts and community organizations, distribution of the poems spread quickly – and, with subscribers sharing and re-posting the installments, soon we had readers, not only throughout the Commonwealth, but across the country.  And I delighted in the weekly e-mails I’d receive with praise for the poets; as one reader recently commented: “You give me the gift of a quiet, contemplative break—with something to take away and reflect on.”

 

Then our circumstance changed dramatically again: following the murder of George Floyd, the massive social and political unrest, and the national economic catastrophe, the distress of the pandemic was magnified.  Red Letter 2.0 announced that I would seek out as diverse a set of voices as I could find – from Massachusetts and beyond – so that their poems might inspire, challenge, deepen the conversation we were, by necessity, engaged in.

 

Now, with widespread vaccination, an economic rebound, and a shift in the political landscape, I intend to help this forum continue to evolve – Red Letter 3.0.  For the last 15 months, I’ve heard one question again and again: when will we get back our old lives?  It may pain us to admit it, but that is little more than a fantasy.  Our lives have been altered irrevocably – not only our understanding of how thoroughly interdependent we are, both locally and globally, but how fragile and utterly precious is all that we love.  Weren’t you bowled over recently by how good it felt just to hug a friend or family member?  Or to walk unmasked through a grocery, noticing all the faces?  So I think the question we must wrestle with is this: knowing what we know, how will we begin shaping our new life?  Will we quickly forget how grateful we felt that strangers put themselves at risk, every day, so that we might purchase milk and bread, ride the bus to work, or be cared for by a doctor or nurse?  Will we slip back into our old drowse and look away from the pain so many are forced to endure – in this, the wealthiest nation on the planet?  Will we stop noticing those simple beauties all around us?  The poet Mary Oliver said it plainly: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”  I will continue to offer RLP readers the work of poets who are engaged in these questions, hoping their voices will fortify all of ours.

 

Two of our partner sites will continue re-posting each Red Letter weekly: the YourArlington news blog (https://www.yourarlington.com/easyblog/entry/28-poetry/3035-redletter-072921), and the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene (http://dougholder.blogspot.com).  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.

 

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 #74

There are no words.  It’s a phrase people resort to in moments of overwhelming emotion – sometimes in response to joy but, more commonly, grief.  Even at our best, we’re aware of how words cannot match the utter complexity of the lived moment nor fully represent the depth of our response.  And yet we feel the need for words nonetheless.  Perhaps that’s because language, when fully empowered, forms – not a mirror – but a second self within our experience, a companion that exists both independently but also in a sort of harmony with what we call (for lack of a better term) our real lives.  And this is not only true for the author but for we readers as well who may discover, entering this shadow-realm, a new sense of what actually matters in our sunlit days.   Such is the case for poet Doug Holder who, in today’s installment, is allowing us to be one of the “treasured guests” to visit with his wife Dianne before she was recently lost to cancer.  It was not the artfulness of this poem that drew me in but its astonishing intimacy.  There is no doubt about the actuality behind this scene – and yet, in its poetic incarnation, we feel we are receiving a privileged understanding of these three beings, there on the verge of an overwhelming grief.  Doug told me Dianne, the gentlest of souls, was a long-time nurse who also wrote poetry and published a chapbook.  But her personal paradise might be the couple’s "cocktail hour” where she’d be “reading, listening to Chet Baker and writing in her journal.”    It is not at all surprising to come across poets willing to dedicate vast amounts of time and vital energy toward exploring their own writing and career.  Far less common is an individual who will offer that sort of dedication to promoting the work of other poets, toward enhancing the vitality of the very artform.  But that is certainly true of Doug: founder of Ibbetson Street Press, creative writing teacher at Endicott College, and publisher of a host of popular blogs that feature poetry and interviews with diverse writers from Massachusetts and beyond.  His ‘Poet to Poet, Writer to Writer’ cable program (blog-spot.com) is a tremendous resource of literary insight and delight.  I feel honored to debut this beautiful elegy in the Red Letters.     And yes: there are no words.  Yet they are so utterly necessary, we reach for them anyway.  And our day is deepened because they were shared.       Dianne At Sleep                (for my wife Dianne Robitaille) As she lays in bed framed pictures, splashes of muted color arise from her tousled head. She mutters some B movie script from a nightly passionate play, while the cat consumes her, his green eyes, a hungry verdant blaze.   We both lay just below her breasts and sleep in a lap for transient, treasured guests.

 

 

            –– Doug Holder

A New Way to Listen by Gerry Grubbs

 

Gerry Grubbs is an attorney who practices law in Cincinnati OH. He has several books from Dos Madres Press, his most recent is Chrysanthemum Moon. This poem touched me, because it is about his communication with his late wife. We are sort of fellow travelers--doug holder

A New Way To Listen

When my beloved calls now

I cannot hear her voice

Her voice is the dew

On the morning flowers

So I must learn

A new way to listen




She calls and it is

The sound of the sea on the sand

Sinking and withdrawing

Now coming again

Now again




My beloved calls

And says my name

As a ray of sun

Illuminating all

Her voice falls on




How can she be so near

When I feel so far away




I hear the birds sing

And it is her voice calling

For my light to rise




Her voice is the sky

Full of that blue

That knows how to call me

And I am the cloud that her voice calls

And that she fills with rain

Which is falling

As my tears fall

Emptying me out

To be filled again

And again

As it pleases her




And it pleases her to find me

Even when I am not looking for her

She still comes

She still watches over me

The way a song watches

Over its notes by singing

Me into existence.

Double Trio by Nathaniel Mackey: Review by Donald Wellman

 

Double Trio by Nathaniel Mackey

  Review by Donald Wellman

I have been reading Nathaniel Mackey’s Double Trio (New Directions, 2020), three volumes, each containing multiple sections in which strands from his long serial poems, Song of the Andoumboulou and Mu are interwoven as was the case in Splay Anthem (New Directions, 2006). The development of these serial poems is a lifework stemming from 2002, a lifework of challenging dimensions that the reader may find daunting, as I do, especially with the recent release of Double Trio. Achieving a remarkable degree of stylistic consistency, each poem and each strophe expands through line and syllable using a prosody first found in School of Udhra where the rhythm of line and strophe is extended by means of monosyllabic hinge points that force enjambment or torquing, “sleepless, eyes like rocks, / night / like so many such nights I’ve known.” The poems of Double Trio adhere to a “bedouin impulse,” pursuing a mélange of threads that incorporate jazz, politics, anthropology and spiritual studies.

Double Trio is structured by the meetings and wanderings of a disparate group of individuals as they experience emotions that are often identified with a gnostic presence, the waft of a perfume, ineffable but vital, “melodic pout, Bedouin updraft” (Trio I, Tej Bet, 73). These comings and goings describe layers of ritual in superposition with the rational realms of quotidian reality, although that reality too appears to be a virtual construct. One of Mackey’s models is found in Victor Turner’s The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. In conversation with Paul Naylor, as early as 2002, Mackey recalls Baudelaire's poem "Correspondences," which he first read in his late teens. Turner uses the poem as an epigraph. Mackey explains, “The book is about

how the Ndembu intuit and enact correspondences between themselves and their environment and among themselves, about a sort of lived poetry, a sense of underlying rapport, about how they sustain or, when it's ruptured, restore such a sense.” In the opening pages of Tej Bet, Mackey again cites Turner, “Ritual, scholars are coming to see, is precisely a mechanism that periodically converts the obligatory into the desirable.” In other words, the obligatory can be said to be punctuated by desire. In the gatherings of spiritual scholars or adepts, including the migrating peoples that populate Double Trio, identity resolves itself and filters through an immanent “might have been.” Ritual enables a “we” and a “way.”

There was a we we were on

our

way towards regardless, no utopic elsewise

too utopic, a we we would eventually be. “Let

the parts congregate and grow,” we got up

insist-

ing a shout so loud it lifted us, our feet left the

floor, no matter it might’ve been mental at

most . . . It was an abstract inaudible ring shout,” (239).

The “ritual” in hand here is modelled on celebrations held by African American congregations. States of “might’ve been” opposed to states of actuality form identity. Virtual, eventual, obscured, abstract or immanent states “lift” the congregation, as an “a we” or an all of us, coinage found in the work of Kamau Brathwaite. Immanence and community are the pivots of Double Trio.

It’s a spell to’ve inhabited a space that splays or spread out. Didn’t Heidegger speak of how poetry dwells? Immanent to the body and released during sex is a perfume associated by Mackey with gnostic spirituality. The bodies of the Andoumboulou, primal Dogon creatures, imperfect or not quite human, as they cross virtual worlds, spread in multiple directions, a scattered flight, in which they seek union among themselves. Different bodies in different conversations create a multilayered discourse, social reality, as it were, ever on the edge of happening. The burr or buzz of song or choric soughing, mixed with pleading and clapping are “the one truth” known by participants.

“Well, well, well.” Said to have been said of Sough

Choir, said of what was, whatever it was, at two

removes, two the very least we knew, Said to’ve

been

said to’ve been caught up in burr, buzz the one

truth we knew . . . So spoke the we I awaited, a

collective wish made by a wished for collective,

his or that mystic bent, splay immanence, this or

that

ythmic event,

“Sough Choir,’ -- mu one hundred and thirty-eight part—Double Trio 1: Tej Bet, 326

In the Nationaal Book Award winning Splay Anthem (2002, 2006) dogon figures work to similar effect. There is a remarkable and deliberate sonance of signs that suggests “dotted bodies,” cattle among the thundering horses of Lascaux and a stick figure that might indicate a body, perhaps that of shaman or ghost among the cattle and bison figured on the walls, the animals too in ghostly guise. I remember Mackey in the years of the composition of Double Trio, bracing himself upon his walking stick, as if he too were a virtual part of the world figured in his poetry, a shaman himself. “Signs / all around, how to read them one of us / knew. It wasn’t we were lost, we lost / track absorbed as we were . . . dotted / bodies bespoke ‘immanent elsewhere’” (97). Twisted and dance-like lines bespeak immanences layered in time and on the page. Perception of this sort consists of layers in both Charles Olson, dear to Mackey, and Giles Deleuze, whose many plateaus are central to my Expressivity and to Mackey’s thought. In Expressivity I undertook an analysis of the forms of immanence so central to the disorienting swirl of Mackey’s poetry. I wrote:

In “Anuncio’s Last Love Song,” Mackey refers to “paper” as “wood’s pressed immanence.” A plane of immanence is always virtual, Deleuze writes, and then he continues, “Absolute immanence is in itself; it is not in something, or to something: it does not depend on an object or belong to a subject.” Immanence has a life, and its life is found not in moments that happen to collide or build upon one another. It exists between moments and “offers the immensity of an empty space where one sees the event yet to come and already happened, in the absolute of an immediate consciousness.” “Paper,” in Mackey’s poem, is subsequent to virtual rings that circle like halos and are likened to pearls, a gnostic image for the soul. His lines require context: Soul and Self’s lyric digest. Circling round our heads went rings of paper, wood’s pressed immanence, pearls we cut

our teeth on, strung, string broken, let’s go . . . Comments on the unwinding of Mackey’s baroque syntax, notes sustained for many bars on a singular horn, further implicate immanence as transcendent to the page, an extended modality of reading’s suggestibilities. “Occasions” or “meanwhiles” exist between “moments” of perception. Here are glimpses of virtualities that are not bound in time. An “occasion” is a plane of consistency populated by multiple moments of perception. (Expressivity 182)

In this poetry from its earlies conception, rings of smoke, haloes, and wells of gnostic light take the form of perfume or melodic pout, as in the case of the minister who in his spiritual transport, with its distinctive postures of crouching and leaping, is driven by or responds to the loud and rhapsodic noise of celebration. In this paper I have been tracking various instances of the immanence that offers glimpses of the wholeness underlying Double Trio.

Mackey’s method of composition seems to be best addressed in the section entitled “I-Insofar’s Last Love Song,” So’s Notice (Trio II). The title of this passage is reminiscent of several of thevpassages with a title that read “Anuncio’s Last Love Song.” “I-Insofar’s Last Love Song” recounts a lying back, a repose or restraint, “what / lay close not to be let in , , , Ooze of honey I’d / have said but held back, tongue tugged on by / tej.” (272). Tej is the Ethiopian honey-wine or mead often invoked for its intoxicating and trance-inducing qualities. The sexual imagery like the perfume cited earlier occupies a between space, as it were between two layers of virtuality. “In-betweenness” is the essence of liminality, “inter / polated, nonce, anomalous kiss.” The imagery of closeness but not quite closeness rhymes with the imagery of composition, an imagery of language use. This section begins with the lines “I listened and I wrote away / from what came at once. To write was to / be at odds or at an angle, bent ventricle I’d / have / said /

had it had to do with heart.” The language loop of listening and writings exists at an angle with the heart, “bent” as in the bent notes of the blues. The image is also quantum-mechanical, a science that posits worlds at right angle to related worlds. The reference here is both to recovery from heart surgery and reminiscences of love. The art is to resist any easy fusion of emotions or conditions and “to write away from” these towards a moment that is itself in itself. Mackey’s grammar contains so many sweet contortions “had it had to do.” Here I hear those “bent notes” clearly. The loveliness of this section of Mu is completely present in the strophe entitled. “I looked and I wrote and I wrote away from / what I saw. I called her crow’s feet filigree” (274), lines recognized as denial in virtuality. Double Trio evokes spaces of love on every page.

Double Trio, a consummate love poem is also a poem about war and dying. In So’s Notice (Double Trio II), the subject of death via decapitation, resonates with a horrify aspect of the world we inhabit, “Decapitism stuck to the end of my tongue” (“Song of the Andoumboulou 1661/2,” 49). Again: “We sought refuge, decapitism at us where- / ever er looked. They were starting the next / war, they were stealing the sky’s ozone,” The scene could well be Iraq with memories of decapitations executed by Isis. (Trio 3, Nerve Church, “Song of the Andouboulou: 216,” 34). “Decapitism is an aspect of capitalism, it’s cause.i Consider the history of oil in the Middle East. Under capitalism, life fades into invisibility, “Citizen vs denizen an inequation we came to / as well, the TV on lest we missed the latest out- / rage. . . . Toward / the end we were only so much breath” (Trio III, Nerve Church, 131). Dying embodies immanence, “a / deep singing sounding like shadows of a voice, gruff / murmur, immanence caught between limbs of a / tree outside” (226). Synesthesia of sound and image one of the destination in Double Trio that

disappears as approached, and yet such states are the object of Mackey’s poetry. Nerve Church presents us with a constant disappearing, a felt disappearing.

Whatever it was, I was feel-

ing it. It was all so inordinate I thought, whatever it was

the horns we couldn’t hear, the water we couldn’t see, a

se-

cret world, whose effects we moved at large in, an im-

manence unvalved, unstopped . . . (156). i "In this installment of the ongoing 'Song of the Andoumboulou,' the poem's transient 'we' stop at the Stick City Ashram. They rename capitalism 'decapitism,' rename prophecy 'profitry,' rename business 'bitness' and revisit poetic dicta, all in the service of 'thought's due ad- / vent.'" — Nathaniel M

*****  Poet, translator, and editor Donald Wellman was born in Nashua, New Hampshire, and attended the University of New Hampshire. Following military service, he earned a PhD from the University of Oregon. ... Wellman is the founding editor of O. ARS, an annual anthology of poetry and poetics.

Dr. Ian Halim: The Yin and Yang of Bloodletting

.....Somerville Bagel Bards member and physician-humanist, Ian Halim, writes about how medicine relates to everything from ethics to botany—aiming to make science accessible to a wide and varied audience. This article will also appear in The Somerville Times.

For centuries, doctors would drain their patients’ blood on purpose in order to try to help them. The ancient but misguided theory was that the body consisted of different fluids, and that health required the right balance of these fluids—humors, as they used to be called. These humors were believed to be responsible not only for health, but even personality and temperament. We get the phrases “ill humor” and “sense of humor,” from this old idea. Black bile was one such humor and gives us the modern word melancholy for sadness (from the Greek “black” melan- and “bile” chol-). Removing blood from the sick was a wrongheaded way to try to correct the supposedly-disease-causing imbalance in the different humors.

This was a theory without evidence. In reality, bloodletting is an assault on the body, starving it of nutrients and the power to supply the tissues with oxygen. When a patient is already sick, bleeding them makes them sicker—and more likely to succumb to disease.

These days, we know that controlled bloodletting is only a good treatment for a couple of rare diseases.


Polycythemia vera is a rare disease of red blood cell excess often caused by a genetic mutation. The treatment, intuitively enough, is removing these excess red blood cells—a kind of modern bloodletting. This is done by using a syringe to draw off blood. As usual, the term for this is from Greek—from words meaning “vein” (phleb-) “cutting” (tom-). In modern hospitals, phlebotomy also refers (in a much more general sense) to the team that handles all blood draws. When you order laboratory studies for a patient, they are added to the “phlebotomy queue.”

Hemochromatosis is another disease treated by phlebotomy. It can result from an inherited problem in the way our bodies process iron, and it's a disease not of red blood cell excess per se, but of iron overload. Iron is a necessary ingredient in the hemoglobin pigment that colors our red blood cells and allows them to carry oxygen. But too much iron is not good. As the saying goes, the dose makes the poison. Over time, if hemochromatosis is untreated it can cause liver failure, diabetes, heart failure, arthritis, and a telltale bronzing of the skin. One of the main places that our body stores iron is in our red blood cells, making removing blood via phlebotomy the best, simplest way to lower the body’s stores of iron and treat the disease.

Except for polycythemia and hemochromatosis, though, losing more than a little blood is usually harmful.




Nowadays, doctors are well practiced at tracking the amount and rate of blood loss. Blood pressure, heart rate, hemoglobin levels, and hematocrit levels are all invaluable ways to track blood loss.




Imagine a balloon filled with water, taut and stretched out. The pressure on it is great. If it is drained, the pressure will drop, and the surfaces will sag and tent inwards. This is a rough approximation of what happens in blood loss. The body can compensate by narrowing blood vessels and using the heart to pump the blood harder and faster. But eventually, if the blood loss is too rapid or too great, these compensatory strategies will fail and the blood pressure will start to drop.




When a patient comes into the emergency room after suffering a car crash or a stab wound, or after starting to vomit blood, having a way to track blood loss is critical. Nearly the first thing that happens when a patient like this comes into the hospital is their vital signs are taking—temperature, heart rate, blood pressure, and the oxygen saturation of their blood. A drop in blood pressure with an increase in heart rate is classic for blood loss (although not unique to blood loss), and will immediately raise concern about the patient, depending on how much the blood pressure has dropped and how much the heart rate has risen. As the balloon grows flaccid—in our model—the heart pumps harder and faster to counteract this. Without adequate blood pressure, tissues will not be getting enough oxygen-rich blood. And eventually, if too much blood is lost, no matter how hard the heart works to counteract it, the blood pressure will continue to drop.




Another way that doctors monitor blood loss is by measuring the hemoglobin and hematocrit—H &H for short. When someone is actively bleeding, the H&H might be taken at regular intervals, to monitor the rate of blood loss. The hematocrit is the relative volume of red blood cells within a given amount of blood. Hemoglobin is the metal protein complex that transports oxygen within our red blood cells, making up the bulk of their non-water weight. If the body loses blood, it will try to retain fluid to maintain total blood volume, but it may not be able to keep up with making enough red blood cells to replace those that are lost—resulting in a relatively dilute blood, and therefore lower amounts of hemoglobin and hematocrit in a given volume of blood.




Hemoglobin, hematocrit, blood pressure, and heart rate are all very useful ways for doctors to monitor blood loss. The clinical situation is very important too, of course, and the idea is to figure out why someone is losing blood, and to stop it. The urgency of intervening will often depend upon the rate of blood loss, and the total amount of blood loss, which can be estimated with our four objective measures. These objective measures are especially meaningful when combined with clinical information about what’s happened to the patient, since other things can cause a high heart rate and a low blood pressure, for example, such as an infection.




These days, we can set aside the theory of the humors. We know that our red, oxygen-transporting blood is precious life-giving stuff. And we are often in a pretty good position to make sure that someone has enough of it to stay alive.

The Red Letters 3.0: A New Beginning (Perhaps)

The Red Letter Poem Project

NOW ONLINE! I was asked to write an essay for Askold Melnyczuk’s Arrowsmith Journal about what I learned from the first year of the Red Letter Project. It also became a meditation about the relationship between poet and reader. If you’d like to take a look, here is a link –

https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/community-of-voices

-- and you’ll also be able to check out the variety of marvelous literary projects that appear under Askold’s Arrowsmith imprint. Enjoy!



At the outset of the Covid pandemic, when fear was at its highest, the Red Letter Project was intended to remind us of community: that, even isolated in our separate homes, we could still face this challenge together. As Arlington’s Poet Laureate, I began sending out a poem of comfort each Friday, featuring the fine talents from our town and its neighbors. Because I enlisted the partnership of seven local arts and community organizations, distribution of the poems spread quickly – and, with subscribers sharing and re-posting the installments, soon we had readers, not only throughout the Commonwealth, but across the country. And I delighted in the weekly e-mails I’d receive with praise for the poets; as one reader recently commented: “You give me the gift of a quiet, contemplative break—with something to take away and reflect on.”



Then our circumstance changed dramatically again: following the murder of George Floyd, the massive social and political unrest, and the national economic catastrophe, the distress of the pandemic was magnified. Red Letter 2.0 announced that I would seek out as diverse a set of voices as I could find – from Massachusetts and beyond – so that their poems might inspire, challenge, deepen the conversation we were, by necessity, engaged in.



Now, with widespread vaccination, an economic rebound, and a shift in the political landscape, I intend to help this forum continue to evolve – Red Letter 3.0. For the last 15 months, I’ve heard one question again and again: when will we get back our old lives? It may pain us to admit it, but that is little more than a fantasy. Our lives have been altered irrevocably – not only our understanding of how thoroughly interdependent we are, both locally and globally, but how fragile and utterly precious is all that we love. Weren’t you bowled over recently by how good it felt just to hug a friend or family member? Or to walk unmasked through a grocery, noticing all the faces? So I think the question we must wrestle with is this: knowing what we know, how will we begin shaping our new life? Will we quickly forget how grateful we felt that strangers put themselves at risk, every day, so that we might purchase milk and bread, ride the bus to work, or be cared for by a doctor or nurse? Will we slip back into our old drowse and look away from the pain so many are forced to endure – in this, the wealthiest nation on the planet? Will we stop noticing those simple beauties all around us? The poet Mary Oliver said it plainly: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” I will continue to offer RLP readers the work of poets who are engaged in these questions, hoping their voices will fortify all of ours.



Two of our partner sites will continue re-posting each Red Letter weekly: the YourArlington news blog (https://www.yourarlington.com/easyblog/entry/28-poetry/3035-redletter-072921), and the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene (http://dougholder.blogspot.com). 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.



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 #73





Summertime and the livin’ is. . . well yes, easy (though perhaps for only moments at a time) – and then desperate, intoxicating, frantic, beguiling, maddeningly boring, drenched in tears and punctuated by (if you’re lucky) bouts of laughter that erupt like fireworks. It’s not just the long stretch of hot days and lush foliage that propel our moods to their extremes. I believe we’ve been conditioned by years of the school calendar to spend nine months longing for the unreasonable promise of summer, only to be confronted by the fitful and all-too-ordinary reality. Needless to say, the entertainment industry helps to compound the anticipation, plying us with frothy summer pop tunes and Hollywood confections that make us crave those fantasies about love and adventure all the more. And as the Buddha has taught us, expectation is the source of all suffering – and so summer provides that too, often in generous doses.



Chen Chen’s poem plays off those summer tropes, though the expectations he’s wrestling with are familial, societal, and even poetical. But by intensifying the feverish turns of the imagination, he seems to be concocting his escape plan. Or is he? Is that fantasy of ‘falling in love midair’ hinting at how flights of the imagination can somehow rescue us – poet and reader alike – or only another catchy top-40 chorus in search of a guitar riff? But what I’m much more convinced of – reading Chen Chen’s highly-acclaimed inaugural collection, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions) – is that this poet has found inventive ways to intensify language while defying assumptions about how a poem must sound. Chen Chen creates seemingly playful vignettes that dazzle the imagination and break the heart, often at the same time. Born in Xiamen, China, he grew up in Massachusetts, and sometimes his writing attempts to surf the riptides between cultures. Recipient of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and the Thom Gunn Award, Chen Chen currently teaches at Brandeis University as the Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence. And so, before the new school year rolls around, I’m humming a summer tune under my breath and thinking: one of these mornings, I’m gonna rise up singing. . . not just because the Gershwin lyric promised us that, but because of magic tricks like the one Chen Chen has pulled off with such aplomb. Perhaps, as August wanes, I really will spread my wings and take to the sky. This poet almost makes it look easy.





Summer Was Forever





Time dripped from the faucet like a magician’s botched trick.

I did not want to applaud it. I stood to one side & thought,

What it’s time for is a garden. Or a croissant factory. What kind

of work do I need to be doing? My parents said: Doctor,

married to lawyer. The faucet said: Drip, drop,

your life sucks. But sometimes no one said anything & I saw

him, the local paper boy on his route. His beanstalk frame

& fragile bicycle. & I knew: we would be so terribly

happy. Our work would be simple. Our kissing would rhyme

with cardiac arrest. Birds would overthrow the cathedral towers.

I would have a magician’s hair, full of sleeves & saws,

unashamed to tell the whole town our first date was

in a leaky faucet factory. How we fell in love during jumps

on his tragic uncle’s trampoline. We fell in love in midair.





–– Chen Chen

 

On Seamus Heaney, by R. F. Foster

On Seamus Heaney, by R. F. Foster 228 pages $19.95 (hardcover)

Princeton University Press, 2020 (“Writers on writers” series)

Review by Denise Provost


R.F. Foster needs no attention from me to burnish his reputation, any more than Seamus Heaney needs Foster to add luster to his. On Seamus Heaney, however, adds welcome layers to our understanding of Heaney as a poet and of the kind of public intellectual who attains moral standing in the wider world. This review aims mainly to draw attention to a valuable book possibly overlooked in the chaos of COVID, and to alert US readers to the merit they will find in Foster’s other writings.

Robert Fitzroy (Roy) Foster is currently Professor of Irish History and Literature at Queen Mary University of London. He was formerly, and remains emeritus, Professor of Irish History at the University of Oxford. As this progression indicates, his academic roots are as an historian. Foster, though, is Irish, and Ireland’s history and literature are intertwined to a degree uncommon among nations. With the publication of Foster’s magisterial two-volume biography of William Butler Yeats, his literary sensitivity and insight became as apparent his exacting scholarship.

On Seamus Heaney is a quite different undertaking than the encyclopedic Yeats biography. It benefits, however, from the same basic methodology. Foster sifts through diaries, correspondence, lecture notes, letters, and early drafts of poems to construct a full view of Heaney’s poetic enterprise. Foster braids together Heaney’s biography and writing with the history of his place of origin, giving us a rounded view of how these elements come together in his art.

Foster connects Heaney’s early life on his parents’ farm – along with his classical education as a scholarship student - to the virtuoso ease of his first major poetry collection, Death of a Naturalist. Publication of that collection set up a “remarkable connection between Heaney and his readership,” which later grew more complicated. Foster charts Heaney’s growing success in the North of Ireland, even as violence against civil rights protesters and other targets – including some of Heaney’s own kin - provided painful new subject matter.

Foster notes that Heaney’s friend, the poet Derek Mahon, “claimed in 1970 that Northern poets operated in a milieu of broader relevance than the ‘narcissistic provincialism’ of the South.” Such a claim may seem astonishing, considering that the Republic of Ireland was at that time not yet fifty years past its war of independence and even bloodier civil war. Yet some poets of the North and others excoriated Heaney for his treatment “of ancient, repetitive, sacrificial violence” in subsequent poetry collections.

Insisting on the “privacy and independence” of the poet, Heaney gave up his teaching post at Queens University, Belfast; moved to the Republic of Ireland, and published his galvanizing fourth major work, North. Heaney’s later international acclaim makes it easy to forget that at this point his writing career, some reactions to his work were “viscerally antagonistic.” Foster examines criticism of Heaney from this period, parsing out critiques based on professional jealousy or political disapproval to provide a clear-eyed and fair-minded assessment.

Foster goes on to examine the influences of Heaney’s religious faith, devotion to Dante, friendships with other poets, and rising international profile in “his remaking of himself in middle age.” In demand as a lecturer, Heaney became a literary essayist. He joined the Field Day cultural cooperative for which he wrote his celebrated play, The Cure at Troy; around this same time, he composed his collection Station Island.

In the long eponymous poem in that volume, Heaney meets the ghost of James Joyce, who says:

“…Your obligation

Is not discharged by any common rite.

What you do you must do on your own




so get back in harness. The main thing is to write

for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust

that imagines its haven like your hands at night…”




On Heaney’s poetic and temporal journeys, Foster is a reliable guide. Of the collections The Haw Lantern and Seeing Things, written in these later years, Foster sees “a chastened and profound investigation into the depths of death and life. The roof had lifted off his world, opening it to new intimations.” One of these was Heaney’s arrival in the post of Professor of Poetry at Oxford, which yielded a series of extraordinary and wide-ranging lectures, in which “Heaney demonstrated his analytical command over different modes of poetic expression….”




Years before, Foster reports, “Heaney remarked that he thought it necessary, as an Irish Writer using the English lyric tradition, ’to take the English lyric and make it eat stuff that it had never eaten before.’” Heaney, in turn, later would – metaphorically speaking – eat the Old English epic poem Beowulf, translating it into modern English. By his doing so, Foster observes “Heaney’s work and reputation were now positioned at the center of the English canon, while operating emphatically from a base in Ireland (North and South.)”




In this same period, Heaney was exploring “the line that divides the actual conditions of our daily lives from the imaginative representation of those conditions in literature, and divides also the world of social speech from the world of poetic language.” He also began to speak of the power of poetry to redress the world’s injustices and imbalances. Yet, at the same time, in Heaney’s work, the “tension between public responsibility and artistic freedom is framed over and over again, decisively and defiantly refusing a simple answer.”




Then, in 1995, Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. His remarkable acceptance speech, “Crediting Poetry” was separately published in book form and has become widely read. Foster reflects, however, that its backdrop of “the blood-spattered infliction of tribally decreed violence…has largely faded from consciousness…over the last quarter-century, if indeed it was ever in clear focus.”




Heaney’s tenure as Nobel Laureate expanded his life as a public figure. These demands came at a time of his life about which Heaney wrote: “I think that the political urgency is past for me. This is more the moment of mortality.” It is during the time which Heaney wrote the poems in his extraordinary final collection, Human Chain, a work about which Foster writes with poignant insight.

I credit Foster with finding exactly the right observations in the other writings of Heaney and his contemporaries to illuminate Heaney’s body of poetry from multiple angles. I hope that others who care about our literary inheritance will use On Seamus Heaney as a standard for writing about writing. Its combination of meticulousness and soul can only enrich our understanding.

Rednecks & Weed-eaters

Rednecks & Weed-eaters


B. Lynne Zika


August: I’ve made three more trips since I wrote the following; William never was home. So the weeds are still tossing their curls into the wind.



June: The weed-eater’s not cranking up. My neighbor Bob recommended a fellow down the road who does small-engine repair. Bob said William’s the truest definition of a redneck you’d ever hope to meet, which was saying something since Bob himself sports a goodly twang and two missing front teeth. Don’t get me wrong; I sympathize with dental issues, and Bob’s a good fellow, married to a German woman who’s got the sweetest, trimmest little kitchen garden a backyard ever boasted. And Bob’s the one who found me the used weed-eater to begin with. It worked well… for a while.

So at Bob’s recommendation I called up William and arranged to swing by the following day. After 5:30, which is when he gets home from work.

William lives a block over, almost directly behind me. There’s something about his section of the street that’s just a tad seedy. Nothing you can exactly put your finger on right away, but as I waited… and waited… for someone to answer the door, the details began to fill in.



1. A piece of chain from a child’s swing set wrapped around one of the wrought-iron pillars on the front porch. Meant for a yard dog, obviously, but there was no dog.



2. Next to the chain, a metal water bowl growing mold samples under an inch of water.



3. On the other porch pillar, the industrious homeowner had tied a black plastic flowerpot with a strip from a black plastic garbage bag. This was the mailbox.



4. Two trucks parked on the grass, one sedan in the driveway.



William never answered the door. I left a note, with my phone number, asking him to give me a call to reschedule. Haven’t heard anything, but he may get around to it eventually. I did notice that despite the fact that I knocked several times, I never did hear any dog barking. May be it died and William just hasn’t gotten around to tossing out the chain and bowl. He might get around to that eventually, too.

Wonder what the turnaround is like on repairing a weed-eater—assuming, of course, he’s actually at home one of these days.

Meanwhile, I reckon I’ll sit out on the porch and watch the grass grow.



Roll tide.

The Red Letter Poem Project

 NOW ONLINE!  I was asked to write an essay for Askold Melnyczuk’s Arrowsmith Journal about what I learned from the first year of the Red Letter Project.  It also became a meditation about the relationship between poet and reader.  If you’d like to take a look, here is a link –

https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/community-of-voices

-- and you’ll also be able to check out the variety of marvelous literary projects that appear under Askold’s Arrowsmith imprint.  Enjoy!

 

The Red Letter Poem Project

 

The Red Letters 3.0: A New Beginning (Perhaps)   

At the outset of the Covid pandemic, when fear was at its highest, the Red Letter Project was intended to remind us of community: that, even isolated in our separate homes, we could still face this challenge together. As Arlington’s Poet Laureate, I began sending out a poem of comfort each Friday, featuring the fine talents from our town and its neighbors. Because I enlisted the partnership of seven local arts and community organizations, distribution of the poems spread quickly – and, with subscribers sharing and re-posting the installments, soon we had readers, not only throughout the Commonwealth, but across the country. And I delighted in the weekly e-mails I’d receive with praise for the poets; as one reader recently commented: “You give me the gift of a quiet, contemplative break—with something to take away and reflect on.”



Then our circumstance changed dramatically again: following the murder of George Floyd, the massive social and political unrest, and the national economic catastrophe, the distress of the pandemic was magnified. Red Letter 2.0 announced that I would seek out as diverse a set of voices as I could find – from Massachusetts and beyond – so that their poems might inspire, challenge, deepen the conversation we were, by necessity, engaged in.



Now, with widespread vaccination, an economic rebound, and a shift in the political landscape, I intend to help this forum continue to evolve – Red Letter 3.0. For the last 15 months, I’ve heard one question again and again: when will we get back our old lives? It may pain us to admit it, but that is little more than a fantasy. Our lives have been altered irrevocably – not only our understanding of how thoroughly interdependent we are, both locally and globally, but how fragile and utterly precious is all that we love. Weren’t you bowled over recently by how good it felt just to hug a friend or family member? Or to walk unmasked through a grocery, noticing all the faces? So I think the question we must wrestle with is this: knowing what we know, how will we begin shaping our new life? Will we quickly forget how grateful we felt that strangers put themselves at risk, every day, so that we might purchase milk and bread, ride the bus to work, or be cared for by a doctor or nurse? Will we slip back into our old drowse and look away from the pain so many are forced to endure – in this, the wealthiest nation on the planet? Will we stop noticing those simple beauties all around us? The poet Mary Oliver said it plainly: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” I will continue to offer RLP readers the work of poets who are engaged in these questions, hoping their voices will fortify all of ours.



Two of our partner sites will continue re-posting each Red Letter weekly: the YourArlington news blog (https://www.yourarlington.com/easyblog/entry/28-poetry/3035-redletter-072921), and the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene (http://dougholder.blogspot.com). 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.



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 #72





“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” The aphorism comes from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Maxims and Arrows and strikes me as being particularly appropriate for the grand societal experiment we’ve all been (rather unwillingly) engaged in these past 18 months. Stripped of some freedom and mobility, distanced from loved ones, often estranged from work (or, in the worst cases, lacking work altogether) – and with the emotional valence magnified by a sense of constant but invisible threat – through what purpose do we carry on our lives? Spurred on by what sense of necessity, or joy?



Some of us have spent the time exhausting the Netflix catalog or devouring every mystery book we could order. Others learned to bake bread or play the ukulele. Thousands of miles were walked through country lanes or city streets strangely thinned of traffic. And many people, who had been living what they once thought were formidable lives, found themselves waking each day to despair. When the sweet habitual of our daily lives is suddenly interrupted, we begin an investigation into what truly keeps us going. For poets – who, through writer’s block, may be forced into such emptiness and doubt for extended periods of time – the expectancy of the next poem is an almost palpable force. And that’s where we find the protagonist of bg Thurston’s poem “Gratitude”: returning home from a yoga class, attending to the household chores, waiting for the first musical sensation that will signal the arrival of a poem’s opening line. After a career in computers and finance, the poet now lives on a sheep farm in Warwick, MA. But poetry was always the spark that lit the lamp that lighted the way forward. Her first collection, Saving the Lamb (Finishing Line Press) received special recommendation by the Massachusetts Book Awards. Her forthcoming book, Cathouse Farm, is centered on the 18th century farmhouse she now calls home. Certainly every writer longs for publication, but it’s those quiet hours working inside the notebook, watching the page fill up with our own glorious scribble – that sustains us and reconfirms the reason for it all.



As a result of this virus, over six hundred thousand families in America alone have suffered the incalculable pain of loss. So how are we survivors to feel as we wait for our cherished why to flourish again in our lives? For the chance to embrace distant relatives or friends? Or to splurge on a return visit to that canal-side campiello in Venice? Or to make that familiar commute to school or office, seeing how much has changed in our absence? Or to invite those much-loved faces to join us around our dining room table? On the morning when the joy returns, the phone rings, the project is completed, the poem arrives: gratitude. And on those darker days when nightmares linger, the headlines are awful, loneliness overflows, and the skies feel barren: gratitude.







Gratitude





After an hour of down dog

and forward fold, we drive



the narrow road home, sun

sinking in a molten sky



where strips of clouds stretch

and wrap around the horizon.



You wonder about squirrels

digging acorns under road salt.



I wonder whether poetry

will ever come back to me.



After the barn chores, feeding

the crew of cats and dogs



I sit waiting, a zazen of hope,

legs crossed and mind open



watching each breath rise

then fall back into the world



which is dark now, but I hear

the muses, quiet, then question



their single syllable that calls

out into the still and cold night.





­­–– bg Thurston



(from: Smoky Quartz – fall, 2019)