Review of Dear So and So by Rusty Barnes

 

Review of Dear So and So by Rusty Barnes

Review by Karen Klein

If you are a visual person, when you open Dear So and So and leaf through it you will be struck by the stanzaic forms of most of the poems. Most of them are sonnets-- 3 quatrains and a couplet--,but poet Rusty Barnes enjoys playing with the form, sometimes adding a line,taking a couple of lines away. The reader will see this playfulness runs throughout this book of love poems; he even includes a poem expressly titled, Not a Love Poem.

The poet has chosen the appropriate form in which to express love; after all that’s where the sonnet form began with the medieval Italian, Provencal poets in their expressions of longing for the beloved, appeals for just a look, just a touch. Whether these poets were truly in love with the beloved object--often a woman socially superior, therefore inaccessible--we don’t know. But as W.H. Auden wrote, “…a person’s statement of belief is no proof of belief, any more than a love poem is proof that that one is in love.” Shakespeare used the sonnet form in English to extend and describe more complex feelings of love--magic, mystery, misery. Barnes writes in this spirit, bringing a unique voice to a literary tradition.

The poems in Dear So and So are in the form of letters, but to whom are they addressed? The dedication is ‘to Heather’, but who is Heather--wife, lover, a single person, a composite of many? The first poem, Marriage for All Ages, punning perhaps on Ages as forever or the age of the couple, opens with a prose-like, five line stanza, describing a maybe fortunate or not sexual encounter. Describing his sexual technique, which guarantees her orgasm as “the Force-5 Forklift Flip,” he is hopeful his partner will marry him, “but two days later you sacked me as your boyfriend/because I didn’t like ‘sex’.” Barnes’ tone here is typical of his throughout--self-deprecating, but leavened with honesty and humor. Not shying away from sexual imagery, he ends his poem which includes a car accident with a deer and an allusion to jail with a declaration of his loving need: “Let your breasts hang from your shirt when you bail/me; smother me with the great guns of love.” How many poets can make a love poem like that?

There is the power of desire in “Dear So and So: the door remains too open” with its plea “teach me again what it means to be loved” from a man “bent on his own destruction.” There also is the sad despair in The Deep Dark Ditch of Love, Or What a Woman Says that She Doesn’t Mean, but on the facing page Vegetable Love: “ Dear So and So: at wholesale prices my love/might be worth five bucks and a fat cracker. Stop teasing. Break down the ways I refuse/to become a reasonably rational adult.” It is the speaker who is teasing, because it is a ‘reasonably rational adult’ who ends this poem: “We loved body to body like leaves,/ the wind always waving us goodbye,/or hello.Yes, hello. Yes love. Yes.” This resounding affirmations rings throughout literature, echoing Molly Bloom’s “Yes I said again, yes” ending Joyce’s Ulysses.

Rusty Barnes’ poems run the gamut from that affirmation to the Bondage Poem which imagines a phantasy of a woman tied down; this image serving as stimulation: “…I’ll take myself in hand anyway. For love.” What, as Tina Turner sung, “does love have to do with it?” For Barnes, it must be part if the mystery and complexity of our sexual, emotional, heartfelt, and instinctual needs. And their domestication as in The Man Addresses the Fight, its Aftermath and the Makeup Sex which ends “Bless the children who coitus interruptus us. Kiss their steamy wet/heads and tuck them in between us; we can continue at dawn.

Red Letter Poem #156

 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 #156

 

 

The tradition of appointing a United States Poet Laureate goes back decades, but I am heartened by the recent proliferation of Laureate positions in cities and towns all across the country. It seems to me to reflect both a desire for a kind of spokesperson for the soul of a community – but also our anxiety that perhaps we, individually, might not possess the words that need to be said, especially in these tumultuous times. I think it’s important to note how diverse are the voices and visions of the poets receiving this mantle, an acknowledgment perhaps that we as a people can be united without necessarily being homogeneous. In her essay "Warning, Witness, Presence", the poet Eavan Boland wrote this about the deep roots of the bardic tradition in her own native Ireland: “Their poems were remembered, recited, kept alive in an oral tradition. Despite the tragedy of their decline, they proved that poetry could keep company with the ordeals of a people." I think this is part of the job description of every poet, but especially those who have accepted this public commission. I am delighted today to bring you the work of the Poet Laureate of Alexandria, Virginia. Zeina Azzam is a Palestinian-American whose family arrived in this country when she was ten. She’s published one chapbook and has appeared widely in journals; today’s poem is from her new collection Some Things Never Leave You (Tiger Bark Press) that will be issued early this summer. She also helps foster the talents of young Palestinians in Gaza as part of We Are Not Numbers, a virtual mentorship program offered by writers from Europe and the US.



Zeina’s poem focuses on the recent earthquake in Turkey and Syria, but it also prompted me to reflect on events closer to home. In the Boston area this week, there’ll be two public commemorations of significance; the first marks ten years since the bombing at the Boston Marathon that took the lives of three individuals and gruesomely wounded 281 runners and spectators at the finish line of the race. We here remember the area-wide lockdown a few days later as police sought out the two domestic terrorists who perpetrated the attack. A decade on, and we remain united in our grief – but in my mind, I’d prefer that the anniversary celebrate the extraordinary efforts that Monday by first responders, medical centers, and even heroic bystanders on blood-soaked Boylston Street – a community coming together in unprecedented ways, and earning the appellation Boston Strong. But this week, we also laid to rest Mel King – politician, community organizer extraordinaire, tireless educator – whose barrier-breaking 1983 mayoral campaign reached into every neighborhood in the city (including places a Black man might have hesitated to visit at that time.) His grassroots movement gave rise to the very first Rainbow Coalition, a term that has since taken hold nationally. Mel – who also wrote poetry, I’m delighted to note – has this signature line as his legacy: “Love is the question and the answer” and it guided all his 94 years on this planet. If I peruse the week’s headlines, it’s clear to me that the questions we’re facing now feel more dire and encompassing than at almost any time in recent memory. It is far from certain how this community, this country will respond to the challenges.



In Zeina’s lovely lyric, she’s using language to extend her compassion halfway around the planet. The people of the Middle East have suffered far more than their share of human-made disasters in recent times, with political clashes often resulting in armed conflict – so it seems grossly unfair for Mother Nature to add to their burden. In her litany of blessings, Zeina is celebrating the aspect of humanity that feels compelled to alleviate suffering – and the enduring spirit that wants to hold on to what precious life is within our grasp. It’s hard not to feel the unspoken question within the poem: what will we do when calamity, in its multiplicity of forms, erupts before us? Is love indeed that bedrock question, revealing what resides deep within us? And will we find the strength to answer in the affirmative?





Prayer for Syria



“When she was rescued, baby Aya was still connected to her mother by her umbilical cord. Her mother, father and all four of her siblings died after the quake hit the town of Jindayris.”



––BBC News, February 10, 2023





Bless the bruised infant, hours old. Bless her life spirit, the holding on.

Bless the mother whose womb sheltered the child,

whose final push was her final breath

was her final mercy.

Bless the umbilical cord that continued to nourish under the rubble.

Bless the sibling souls who wanted to protect their tiny sister.

Bless the father who tried.

Bless the innocent and the brave crushed by walls and floors from above,

injured or dead by fires and flying glass.



Bless the hands that heft heavy stones,

the ears that hear fading cries,

the town that toils on and on.

Bless the doctors and nurses and medicines,

the suturing, the setting of bones,

the healing.

Bless those who bring food and water and warmth.

Bless the ones who sew the shrouds and bury the dead.

Bless the prayerful who bestow grace and blessings.

Bless the life spirit, the holding on, the holding on.





––Zeina Azzam

 

 

The 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

The Sacrifice of Isaac: A Poem Series. Keith Tornheim Poetica Publishing. 2022. 40 pp. $15.00

 

REVIEW BY RUTH HOBERMAN

When I think of the story of Abraham and Isaac, I think of a Rubik’s cube—with its colored squares you’re supposed to shift until each side of the cube is a single color. But shift one panel to make it right, and another shifts out of place. In the same way, that story about God and Abraham fails to make sense to me no matter how many times I turn it this way and that. I can admire Abraham’s faith as long as I don’t look at what God’s asking him to do. I can admire God’s provision of the ram, as long as I don’t look at what he put Abraham and Isaac through first.

Keith Tornheim’s recent collection of poems, The Sacrifice of Isaac, works the story as if it were Rubik’s cube: turning it every which way, each poem giving voice to a different participant (not only God, Abraham, Isaac, Sarah, the servants, and the angel, but also the ram, the thicket, the rock). I found the juxtaposition of these viewpoints surprisingly moving, and surprisingly surprising: such an old story can still appear strange.

The thirty-one poems open with an account of a Persian plate the speaker’s mother admired in a Boston antique shop, a plate depicting “Father Abraham with the knife/raised above Isaac his son,/whom he clasps against his chest.” Tornheim bought the plate as a gift for her, then inherited it when she died, but found himself “uneasy as the heir/of this testament of her certainty and faith.”

He’s not the only uneasy one. How can a righteous God ask such a thing? How could a loving father do it? Kierkegaard, Leonard Cohen, and countless rabbis have asked the same question. Tornheim works very much within the Midrashic tradition of rabbinic commentary; in

fact, many of his poems have been read as part of High Holy Day services, when the “binding of Isaac” is the Torah portion for the day. “Who knows what really happened atop Mt. Moriah?” the speaker asks in the title poem. “All are dead, except God./Perhaps Abraham acted differently from what is written.”

Or perhaps the rocks did. In “Memorial Stones,” those rocks which “by God’s grace never tasted Isaac’s blood” become the site of future suffering:

And afterward that angel of the Lord

carried the stones away one by one

and dropped them at designated points

in places in a distant land.

There they waited for four thousand years

in Dachau, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen…

until at last their thirst was quenched

in Buchenwald, Treblinka and the rest…

with blood of Isaac’s seed.

Tornheim’s poems have the stark, paratactic style Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis associates with Biblical narrative—we see only spotlit actions, with minimal context. But each poem shifts the spotlight, aligning us with contrasting, contradictory viewpoints. In the process the emphasis shifts from the story’s message to what it might have felt like to the individuals involved.

One poem, “Abraham’s Sacrifice,” points out that the story is more properly known as the “binding,” not the “sacrifice” of Isaac, since Isaac is not sacrificed. For many rabbis, this is the point: the story teaches us that human sacrifice is not acceptable. But surely the same point could have been made without causing so much pain. Because “Abraham sacrificed his son/in the depths of his heart” the poem suggests, “it was his heart/that Abraham gave to God”:

And Isaac knew it.

And Sarah knew it,

and it broke hers.

So it was that Abraham sacrificed

their hearts, too.

The poem ends blessing God (somewhat bitterly, it seems to me) as “King of the universe,/Receiver of hearts.”

Because the human price seems so disproportionate to the lesson learned, Tornheim can’t rest with any single explanation. In “I Should Not Have Asked,” God decides it was all a mistake. Both “The Testing” and “Adonai-yireh”suggest that rather than God testing Abraham, perhaps Abraham was testing God:

And when I raised the knife,

God had to answer, to reveal Himself

as a God of life,

not one of the old gods of death.

Other poems suggest it was God’s test, but he failed to understand its consequences. Sarah’s heart, Abraham’s heart, Isaac’s heart: all are shattered by what they learn. “How long must I rock him in the night,” an angry Sarah asks Abraham on his return. “And then who will comfort me?”

But my favorite poem is “Borrowed,” in which no one’s heart gets broken. Even the sheep turns up unharmed, returned to its shepherd although “not so frisky as before,” and smelling of smoke. When the shepherd later journeys near an encampment “whose headman we were told worshipped/a strange and solitary god”:

. . . Abraham himself came out

to see that we were well provided for.

And when he saw our ram—

it was the strangest thing!—

he bowed his head in silent thanks,

and our ram nodded back at him.

In its simplicity, its refusal to explain, and in the stark beauty of its language (the assonance of “thing” and “him”; of “thanks” and “ram”; the defamiliarizing effect of Abraham as “headman”), “Borrowed” is typical of Tornheim’s best poems: their strange, evocative mix of understated mysticism and humanity.

Ultimately, The Sacrifice of Abraham suggests, we are the stories we tell. The book’s final poem, “Looking Back,” invokes history and collectivity—the “we” formed by shared stories:

Scars become legends,

legends become scripture;

a family becomes a people.

And the ram becomes “ancient smoke/that still swirls around us.” What all this says, finally, about God, violence, sacrifice, and humanity, I’m not sure. Maybe just that we need to think, when we read those old stories or even the newspaper, less of what the lesson is and more of whose heart is getting broken.

Red Letter Poem #155

 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 #155

 

 

 

To borrow a phrase from another illustrious poet, there is an artful arrangement within even our ordinary days, which Mr. Heaney termed the music of what happens.  Unfolding in a single lifetime – or in the cycles of centuries – there are rhythms, refrains, changes in key, and distinct melodies.  Some are hauntingly beautiful, some shrill and jarring, and others so blessedly nondescript they become our background accompaniment, barely noticed.  Walt Whitman made a conscious choice to move away from the classical forms of European poetry, to fashion something closer to the conversational voice and more embracing of the ordinary.  I can easily trace a direct lineage – from the songs of the Bard of Democracy; through someone like Frank O’Hara and his peripatetic I do this, I do that lyrics; to today’s Red Letter poet, Mark Pawlak.  Not only have they all, at one time or another, been entranced by the blab of the pavement on some of those same New York City streets, they maintain a faith that within the clear-eyed, matter-of-fact moments of our days, something essential is revealed.  Beauty is what rings true within the quiet mind.

 

So it is in “Signs and Cyphers”, a brand-new poem from his forthcoming collection Away (which will appear in the fall from Hanging Loose Press.)  The narrator steps out into a spring day (very much like the one outside my window right now), and makes his way – where?  Work? Grocery shopping? Simply wandering?  And on his way, there is a melodic unreeling of verses where the mundane reveals just the faintest glimmer of capital-B Beauty, before receding beyond our attention.  Most of us possess the sorts of lives that will go unrecorded in the chronicles of our tumultuous era.  And yet, when it’s our shadow yawning across the crosswalk; or our breakfast berries, still sweet on the tongue; or our lost shoe, Cinderella-like – these artifacts seem mysterious, like items recovered from some Egyptian tomb.  We feel in them an utter momentousness that may be the hallmark of human consciousness.  After all, what thing more precious do any of us possess than the claims on life staked by an observing mind?  And Mark is the sort of poet whose attention is keyed-in to the modest glory to be found in such dailiness.  Whitman, I believe, would smile at his singing.  And as for “Billy J. 1987”, wherever you are: may today’s sun be warm upon your shoulders.

 

Writer, editor, educator, peace activist – Mark is the author of nine previous volumes of poetry including Reconnaissance: New and Selected poems & Poetic Journals (also from the Hanging Loose imprint) which gathers selections from across a decade of published work.  He also published recently My Deniversity (MadHat Press) – a memoir of his friend and mentor, the late Denise Levertov – in which he describes how he learned just how much of a life one could commit to the search for honest poems.  A native of Buffalo, New York, for many years now you can find Mark pounding the pavement in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and gathering up in language what others could not stop to notice in their hurried day.

Signs and Cyphers

Stepping out into the spring breeze

to find pear blossoms scattered

over where someone wrote in

the once wet cement: “Billy J. 1987.”

 

And chalked on another concrete slab,

faintly visible beneath hopscotch squares

a palimpsest: outline of a child,

legs and arms akimbo.

 

And at the busy avenue,

my long shadow in the crosswalk:

run over by passing cars,

again and again.

 

Yesterday, two women—a team?—

silently worked opposite sides

of this same street, where

trash cans were out for pickup.

 

One, slender, primly dressed:

dark stockings, dark skirt,

matching waist-length coat,

sensible shoes and pillbox hat;

 

the other, heavyset, sweat shirt,

sweat pants, high-top sneakers, dark curls

peaking out under multicolor knit hat;

each pushing a grocery cart bulging with plastic bags.

 

And yesterday stepping off the bus

in a sudden downpour my hatless neighbor eyed

the broken umbrella discarded

in the gutter and cracked a wry smile.

 

Today, on the bus shelter’s metal bench

an empty Marlboro flip-top box next to

a plastic container half full of ripe berries—

someone’s hurried breakfast?

 

It’s moving day and out bus window:

lamps, chairs, dressers, sofas,

box-springs—you name it—

heaped at curbsides.  In the square,

 

passersby can’t disturb this man

sleeping in the alley behind the post office

on a mattress dragged off the sidewalk—

overstuffed rucksack, his pillow.

 

Around the corner outside the boutique shoe store,

canvas lawn chairs line the sidewalk

where suburban boys in sleeping bags have spent the night

to get first crack at limited-edition sneakers.

 

And on brickwork at the subway entrance,

a woman’s high-heel shoe,

black patent leather—lost? discarded?

— just one, the left.

 

Where was she coming from?

Where was she headed?

Did she leave this one shoe behind

and continue hobbling on?

 

Or did she slip off the other as well

and proceed in stocking feet

along the cold pavement

late for her rendezvous with what prince?

 

Yesterday, dressed in fatigues,

a panhandler on milk crate

extending to passersby his upturned cap

which jostled with a few rain-damp coins.

 

Today, same milk crate, unoccupied

except for a rude, cardboard sign—ANYTHING HELPS—

block lettered message left for contemplation,

cypher to interpret—ANYTHING HELPS!

 

Spring breeze,

pear blossoms scattered

where someone wrote in

wet cement: “Billy J. 1987.”

 

 

    ––Mark Pawlak

 

 

 

The 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