Red Letter Poem #157

 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 #157

 

 

 

 

Moon Light

 

 

Bless her who blessed us with

this gift, this bauble, pharos-

 

paraphrase of Earth’s,

our satellight, a bubble

 

to make your room a fable

of seeing through the night.

 

This 3-D-printed globe,

crater by crater true,

 

minutely rough—as is,

no doubt, the original

 

to the soft hand of God—

hankers to show us us.

 

Who knew it was so light?

—that clinker in the sky,

 

to rest its ounces on

a wireframe cube of basswood.

 

Who knew it had a button

to switch from gold to rare

 

blue, and dim it too?

We said this afternoon,

 

looking ahead to night,

Last up turns out the Moon!

 

 

     ––Charles O. Hartman

 

 

Fearing that I might rob you, dear reader, of even a bit of the pleasure contained in today’s offering, I decided to flip the order and present my comments after you’ve read the poem.  “Moon Light” comes from Downfall of the Straight Line, a new manuscript upon which Charles Hartman is just putting the finishing touches.  But since there will necessarily be a lag before you and I can enjoy this, his eighth poetry collection, I’ve found myself going back to his always-intriguing New & Selected Poems (Ahsahta Press, at Boise State University.)  There are abundant pleasures in his complex and spirited approach – but his work raises a question in my mind: how do we learn to sit with poems that may defy easy interpretation or that require our minds to race as nimbly as their creators through interwoven thoughts?  This much is certain: the course between a poet’s heart and the world is, indeed, rarely a straight line. 

 

This reminded me of something I heard recently on the NPR program Radiolab.  They were devoting their hour to The Universe in Verse which is, by its own description, “an annual charitable celebration of the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry.”  How marvelous to discover that thousands flock each year to their in-person events, or to their website to savor animated poems combined with original music.  Such things represent the triumph of curiosity and delight in an age when science and deep knowing have become suspect in some quarters.  But during their introductions, Radiolab co-host Latif Nasser was honest enough to confess his fear about poetry: that perhaps he just won’t “get it.”  He is not alone.  For many – especially those whose introduction to verse came in a classroom with a less-than-sympathetic instructor – poetry was sometimes used as an assessment device to measure reading comprehension and intellectual dexterity.  Some of my own teachers seemed to believe that poets were simply syntax technicians creating elaborate coded tracts to defy comprehension by the average reader.  But the work of poets like Charles seems to underscore Robert Frost’s famous formulation that poetry “begins in delight and ends in wisdom.”  He – like any fully-empowered child – is more often engaged in a kind of serious play, granting his mind tremendous latitude to reach into unfolding experience and find new ways to grasp what the universe is offering.

 

Let’s begin with the quiet surprise in the title: not the moonlight we might expect, but a moon(-shaped) (night)light – a gift from one loving friend to a new couple.  And is it the light itself or her love-token that reminds the speaker of that ancient lighthouse in Pharos guiding sailors homeward?  The home (and the mind) certainly does become a ‘fabled’ place within the procession of these luminous couplets.  When you hear the deft and unexpected music within his lines, it will come as little surprise that Charles is also a jazz guitarist.  Reading “pharos/-paraphrase” aloud; or catching the echo between “bauble”, “bubble” and “fable” – it’s hard not to feel these sounds delighting the tongue and ear.  And when he contemplates “the soft hand of God” that “hankers to show us us”, that last bit of reverb pulses out into the atmosphere like a signal beacon.  When, on even the most glorious days, the poet must look “ahead to night”, I’m imagining a happy couple anticipating their warm bed – yet I cannot help but detect a bit of uncertainty in that minor chord, recalling the encompassing ‘night’ we’re all journeying toward.  Again, my heart lifts with his playful enjoinder: “Last up turns out the Moon!” but I’m mindful of that faint overtone of apocalyptic anxiety, picturing our universe quietly extinguished.  Despite what your eighth grade teacher may have implied, there is no one way to 'get' the fullness at the heart of a poem’s unfolding – but there is a more resonant awareness that grows, the precursor of Frost’s wisdom.  Reading “Moon Light”, I find my mind climbing those same stairs, grateful that my own beloved is close at hand.  And perhaps it’s only human that I’ve the urge to add an addendum to the poem: “…and may the first one down in the morning remember to switch on the sun.”

 

 

 

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

Somerville's Mila Cuda : A Weaver of a Web of Poetry

 

 Interview with Doug Holder

Recently, I caught up with Somerville poet Mila Cuda. A recent graduate of Wellesley College, she has weaved her poetry into film, slam performance, and other venues.

You are from L.A. -- how has Somerville been for you as an artist, compared to the environs of California?


Somerville offers weather and walkability that Los Angeles simply cannot match. While I love Los Angeles, and am grateful to have been raised in the city of angels, it was time for a change. I was tired of planning my days around traffic — tired of the sparse landscape and (if you can believe it) the sunshine. As a poet who is inspired by nature and time, I love that Somerville allows me to experience the shifting of the seasons. I did not know the true meaning of winter until I moved to the East Coast. I did not know the shades of autumn or the joys of spring. The poetry scene in Los Angeles is vibrant and expansive, but I love how the city of Somerville encourages creativity within a closer community. I can attend The Moth, develop film, pick up fresh produce, return my library books and take a dance class all within a few blocks!


You were lead poetry editor for the film Summertime -- Tell us--how is it for a poet working in film?


The film Summertime was an exciting collaboration unlike anything I had ever done. I worked with 25+ young poets to edit and weave our writing into a cohesive, cinematic narrative. The film was directed by Carlos López Estrada and premiered at Sundance 2020 before releasing in theaters nationwide the summer of 2021. I found that poetry and film are surprisingly alike; they have the ability to distill experiences and immense emotion down to their most essential images. While I have not continued to work in film, I hold this project close to my heart — primarily because I cherish the collaborative creative efforts that went into the making of Summertime, but also in part because it revealed to me the many ways poetry can evolve off the page.


You studied at Wellesley College. Who were your mentors; who inspired you?


Yes! I was lucky enough to study under three wonderful poets: Frank Bidart, Dan Chiasson, and Octavio R. González. Each mentor offered a distinct and valuable insight. Bidart (whose poems I had memorized by heart, long before I knew he was a professor at Wellesley) taught me how a title can make or break a poem. Chiasson taught me to consider the shape of a poem—how enjambment can inform rhythm and setting. González taught me how to balance whimsy and rage. Other inspirations I hold close to my creative heart include Mary Oliver (of course), Hanif Abdurraqib, Jamaal May, Naomi Shihab Nye, Imani Davis, Paul Tran, Tarik Dobbs, Richard Siken, Franny Choi…the list goes on and on and on…


I noticed that you have been described as a Sapphic Slam poet. How would you describe that label?


As a poet who came up in the spoken word scene, and whose queer identity is the heartbeat behind many poems—I have no qualms with the label, though I do feel I have evolved past ‘slam poet’ as a descriptor. I don’t perform often, let alone compete in poetry slams anymore. While that subculture is still alive—beautiful and thriving—it has grown harder for me to find joy in performing. I say performing to distinguish from reading. I don’t think I will ever tire of reading poems for an audience—letting the words speak for themselves without the added pressure and theatrics of slam poetry. Maybe one day I will find my way back…but for now I want to focus on cultivating a relationship between word and reader, experimenting with new forms and methods of expression.


It seems you like all things spiders. Are you spinning a sort of web with your poems in order to capture the reader?


I love this question, and I certainly do hope to capture the reader (in a non-threatening way—haha). The poem I have included below is titled “Wordum Wrixlan,” which is an expression that was used to describe the making of poetry in Old English; it means to weave together words. I learned this phrase in a class called ‘The History of the English language’ — a class I admittedly dropped out of as I struggled to find my footing — my sole takeaway being this concept of weaving words. “Wordum Wrixlan” reflects on my first year at Wellesley College, a time when my writing was heavy with sadness—a teenager struggling to find her place on this cold coast. Back then, I wrote out of necessity. Now, I write out of habit. Some weaver spiders eat their webs at dawn and construct new ones at night. I think of this action as a metaphor for my own writing. It is okay to write at night and delete it all at dawn—to remake and reinvent your art in the name of efficiency, practice and joy.


Tell us about your recent project with the Somerville Arts Council.


Earlier this year, I was awarded a Literature Artist Fellowship from the Somerville Arts Council. For my community benefit project, I created mason jars full of poems (some my own, some by authors I admire) in honor of National Poetry Month and placed them throughout Somerville, encouraging passersby to take a poem to keep with them. I wanted to find a way for folks to celebrate and engage with poetry—especially folks who maybe don’t have the time to attend a workshop or read an entire collection. These jars can be found along the community path, by the new green line extension, on the Somerville library shelves…My hope is that people take a moment to pause and pocket a poem, carrying the words with them as encouragement or inspiration.


Wordum Wrixlan


At eighteen,

impulse and daydream

divided by silkscreen.


The commute to Cheever

is two miles of blind spots,

rounded up.


Each walk,

I want the wind

in the road to make ice


out of me—

stutter into

stained glass.


I write to keep

from spiraling, spinning, drifting,

dancing into traffic.


At twenty-two,

the urge to disappear

disappears


& Oma asks

where the poems have gone.

I show her the steady weaver,


yanking sunlight from inside,

scribbling threads

to swallow at dawn.


Patient as an ocean

brought to boil.

Still still.

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