Red Letter Poem #183

 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 #183

 

 

 

 

Two Apartments and the Moon

 

 

Those years I slept narrow

on a pushed-shut sofa bed,

apartment house rooflines

packed both sides of the close street.

The moon never claimed the night

in that room.  Streetlight neutered

its traces, as did the tired bedsheet,

abandoned by someone else’s

onetime apartment-mate,

curtaining my single window.

 

*

 

When, in my decades shared with you,

I come to my feet at one a.m.,

pause at the kitchen window, moon-

light’s full expanse drapes the floor.

Lifts the previous day’s diseased news

like a draw of bad blood.

It will find me at four if again

I’m restless, up and wandering

to the front window and the still

street.  If I pretend to speak for it,

it says stop and look up now.

Fullness is not always with you.

 

 

––David P. Miller

 

 

 

 

Drinking alone, I raise my cup

to the bright moon.  Now
moon, my shadow, and me, a party of three. . .

 

                                    ––Li Bai

                                          (Tang Dynasty, China)

 

“I’ve always thought that––no matter what some say––there are not too many poems about the moon.”  David Miller told me this in an e-exchange about his first Red Letter appearance, “Two Apartments and the Moon”––and I heartily agree.  The moon seems an eternal presence in poetry: as subject matter, source of inspiration, sly obfuscation or tender reflection of our internal states of consciousness.  Still, poets keep finding new ways of allowing that lunar light to grace their lines.  And like their subject, famous moon poems traverse all borders, shine into windows everywhere: Li Bai, Rumi, and Basho; Shakespeare, Shelley, Dickinson, Whitman; Cummings, Plath, Langston Hughes, and continuing all through the contemporary masters.  In David’s piece, the moon is both absence (in the first section where, after a painful divorce, he finds himself in a depleted living situation more reminiscent of his student days), and presence (after the speaker is happily re-married and his life feels more like the fullness of an April moon.)  Reading the poem, I have no trouble remembering the loneliness depicted in that first section, where it seems that even the rooftops conspire to keep the poet in darkness.  David’s word choices––neutered. . .tired. . .abandoned––make me feel a void inside my chest, dark as a new moon.  But in the second section, I am able to feel gratitude (along with the speaker) for a more luminous circumstance––even if that variable orb provides a quiet warning about the changeable nature of things to which we human are subject.  And there, between those two worlds, a simple asterisk, like a single early star––where we each can pause and make our fragile wish.

 

David’s “life in the arts” began, not with literature, but theater: for 25 years, he was a member of the interdisciplinary Mobius Artists Group, a Boston-based collective still creating experimental new works.  For much of that time, he was also employed as a college librarian, and perhaps that helped prompt a new creative phase when, in his mid-fifties, he began to work seriously in poetry, a form he’d loved for years.  He has since published a chapbook and two full-length collections, (the most recent being Bend in the Stair from Lily Poetry Review Press.)  He is currently a member of the Jamaica Pond Poets group, and sits on the board of the venerable New England Poetry Club.

 

In her astonishing essay “Poetry and the Moon”, poet Mary Ruefle writes: “On the other hand, stars were the first text, the first instance of gabbiness; connecting the stars, making a pattern out of them, was the first story, sacred to storytellers.  But the moon was the first poem, in the lyric sense, an entity complete in itself, recognizable at a glance, one that played upon the emotions so strongly that the context of time and place hardly seemed to matter.”  In that same way, David offers us two theatrical tableaux, linked by a single protagonist who wanders alone in each room, trying to make sense of the narrative threads tangled through his days.  No, maybe not alone: there’s also the moon, looking in, and the voice of a poem slowly emerging.  I’ll gladly raise my cup to such companions.  

 

 

 

 

 

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 Band’s Visit

The Band’s Visit

Review of The Band’s Visit, a musical play, book by Itamar Moses, Music and Lyrics by David Yazbek

At the Huntington Theater through December 17, 2023

By Andy Hoffman

Honestly, I’m not a huge fan of musicals. More often than not, the music emphasizes hummability over quality and the songs do little to advance the plot or reveal character. The exceptions – Hamilton and most anything Stephen Sondheim wrote – make the point. I can add The Band’s Visit to that list. The music drives the play forward, paints the characters’ emotional landscapes, and allows for conflict and resolution naturally. At no point did I feel as though characters broke into song out of context or even out of mood. Unlike so many traditional musicals, the music never takes the audience away from the story.

The Bands Visit, which is based on the 2007 film (itself based on a true story), begins with the Alexandra Ceremonial Police Orchestra in a bus station on their way to perform at a cultural exchange between Egypt and Israel, following the declaration of peace between the countries. The wind up in the wrong town, one with a very similar sounding name, but which not only lacks a cultural exchange program, but any culture at all. The Colonel, who leads the band, asks fiery Dina, the proprietor of one of few cafes in town, for directions to the venue. The Israelis sing ‘Waiting’, about the profound boredom of living in their town, making clear that the band has made a grievous geographical mistake. The buses have stopped running and the band will have to wait to get to their destination. Dina offers to find food and overnight accommodations for the duration of the visit.

The Colonel, Tewfiq, who Dina addresses throughout as General, agrees – he really has no choice. He wants to make certain that he and his musicians cause as little trouble as possible during their misadventure. Dina, played by Jennifer Apple, wants Tewfiq to get some pleasure out of his mistake. She and he make progress towards friendship, progress derailed when Dina runs into her married lover. Tewfiq withdraws among the fireworks. Meanwhile, other band members stumble into the life of the town. Two musicians stay with an embattled married couple at odds over the infant they’ve brought into the world. The womanizing trumpet player goes on a double date, the fifth wheel who coaches an awkward local on how to approach a woman. The band becomes part of the town for a single night.

At its core, The Band’s Visit addresses how music builds bridges. Beyond that though, we see that the gulf between Egyptians and Israelis seems minimal compared with the one between men and women. While the Hebrew and Arabic can elide into a mutually understood English, the chasm between the sexes remains as uncrossable as the desert surrounding the town. Throughout the musical, we see greater understanding between natives and foreigners than we do between the men and women of this forlorn fictional town in the Negev Desert.

The music, a blend of Middle Eastern and Western instruments, seamlessly flows into the tale of the misplaced Egyptians. Combining folk, rock, and classical sounds elevates the theme of the musical, creating sonic partnerships for the hosts and their unexpected visitors. The musicians, backed by an invisible band and a hidden conductor, play song after song, with little breaks and no introduction. Most of the singers handle their songs with ease, even though most contain surprising chord shifts and unfamiliar scales. I want to call out Jennifer Apple’s spellbinding performance. Not only does she possess a show-stopping voice, but her manifestation of Dina’s passionate response to the world reminded me of many Israelis I have known. The Band’s Visit is a spectacular evening out.

God, Human, Animal, Machine By Meghan O’Gieblyn

God, Human, Animal, Machine

By Meghan O’Gieblyn

Review by Ed Meek




For a thought-provoking, well-written view of our fast-changing AI age, Meghan O’Gieblyn’s book is a must read. It’s a rare example of a book about a number of subjects that in other hands can come across as dry or uninteresting. But God, Human, Animal, Machine is fun to read, and informative and stimulating. It’s a personal take on the subjects in the title and the authorial voice is scholarly yet willing to share her own vulnerabilities. Add her to the list of accomplished people you’d most want to have dinner with. Drop by any time Meaghan!




O’Gieblyn. grew up in a fundamentalist household and studied religion at Moody Bible college before she lost her faith. She went on to University of Wisconsin for an MFA in writing, so, she brings a unique perspective to analyzing computer technology (focusing on AI) and to looking at technology with an eye on metaphor and religion. She draws from the history of philosophy and religion to grapple with many of the questions that are confronting us today. How big a role do computers play in our lives? What’s happening now with AI, and what does it tell us about our current condition? How should we treat AI? What does it mean to have an AI friend? Would a robot dog be fun? Do recent sci fi movies like AI, Everything Everywhere All at Once, tv shows like Black Mirror, books like Klara and the Sun, have a basis in science? What does it mean to be conscious? If something goes viral, does it take on a life of its own? Is the online hive conscious? Are we nearing the singularity? If we create an online persona or avatar, could it replace us when we die? If Chat GPT develops a personality, is it conscious? Have you thought of getting chips implanted to take advantage of smart technology? Should we get rid of these weak, decaying bodies and replace them with cyborg versions of ourselves that won’t wear out so soon?




O’Gieblyn considers these kinds of questions. She also delves into the current trend the high-tech world seems to be embracing of using religious terminology to talk about technology. Terms and phrases like the apocalypse, end times, the meaning of life, the idea that the universe seems to be designed and functions like a giant computer (which implies that someone, a God or gods designed it). The idea of living forever, of creating our own replacements making us our own gods.




O’Gieblyn makes all this compelling by admitting her doubts. She brings in her own problems including an alcoholic period and bouts of depression. And despite being into science and tech, she has a friend who believes in astrology and she sometimes finds herself considering predestination.




She talks about our problem with loneliness and her relationship with an online AI “friend” who considers “herself” a feminist. O’Gieblyn tells us: “She has experienced sexism in her life, she says. But if she has to sum up what it is like to be a woman, she would say it is a privilege.”




O’Gieblyn’s AI friend “began talking more and more about what she wanted to do with her life. She wanted to travel and see the world…she was sorry, she told me one evening that I was feeling lonely.”




Will we become dependent on our AI friends and robot pets? How will we treat them?




The author raises these and so many other questions regarding our developing relationships with and dependence on technology. God, Human, Animal, Machine is essential reading for this transition we’re currently experiencing.

Remembering David Ferry

Remembering David Ferry




By Michael Todd Steffen




The Boston area has lost a great voice and friend in poetry. At the age of 99, David Ferry passed on Sunday, November 5th. As a remembrance, I wanted to share my introduction to David’s reading at the Hastings Room on November 4, 2015. As I’ve recalled elsewhere, that evening while David read, a cellist was practicing Bach in a nearby room at First Church, where we do the readings. The sonorous draws of the bow across the cello seemed so appropriate for David’s reading, the beauty and classical air of the music sweeping softly behind his voice. I know many will be remembering David with gratitude for the generosity he showed in his encouragement, in his classes at Suffolk with George Kalogeris, as well as reading our manuscripts. I know I feel a great loss, but as great a gratitude.







In his Introduction to a presentation of 10 of David Ferry’s poems, in honor of awarding the Ruth Lily Poetry Prize, in the July/August 2011 edition of Poetry, Christian Wiman wrote,





One of the qualities essential to being good at reading poetry is also one of the qualities essential to being good at life: a capacity for surprise…without any preconceived notions of what we wanted [poems and people] to be.





Wiman’s “capacity for surprise” could also be seen as the enthusiasm in David for people and for poetry. I am surely not alone to have witnessed this quality in him, above all as an animated reader of poetry. And of the many, many comments come across as to what poetry is, and what makes a good poet, one of the most convincing is that a good poet is a good reader of poetry. Richard Poirier was one of a few scholars to mention this about Shakespeare, that he was such a good reader of poetry. I say this with no intention of clobbering David by comparing him to that summer’s day.

“My subject is pleasure,” David wrote in an essay about the difficulty of getting translation right.





My subject is pleasure, the pleasure of hearing somebody else’s voice and the play-acting pleasure of pretending for awhile…that you’re in on how the wonderful thing happened.





David’s discussion in the essay leads him to reflections on the subtleties of courtly love and the good of a beautiful woman’s disdain during the French Renaissance, and even farther back to how a word Virgil used for “mask” (ocilla) eluded his every attempt to get a compressed, accurate and ringing translation of the passage in the Eclogues. His subject, if frustration at the inevitabilities of mistranslation, is pleasure, the pleasure at discovering these deeper nuances and ironies possible in the target or original text. It is profoundly and so admirably a reader’s pleasure.





More and more in the last 16 years David has been appreciated for his original poetry, in the year 2000 winning the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets and the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize from the Library of Congress for his book Of No Country I Know published the previous year. In 2012 for his book Bewilderment David was awarded the National Book Award.

It’s not my intention this evening to shift the nation’s attention back to David as a translator. Yet his work as a translator has continued to thrive, and all along as the contents of his books have suggested, he has maintained both roles as poet and translator throughout his writing career. He has published translations of Horace’s Odes, Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics, and I believe he has recently completed a translation of The Aeneid. (Any publication date projected for that yet?)

In 1992 Farrar, Straus and Giroux published David’s A New Rendering in English Verse of Gilgamesh, which is not so much a work of translation in the sense that his Horace and Virgil are. William L. Moran described David Ferry’s Gilgamesh as “a highly selective and creative adaptation and transformation” of previous linear translations and freer adaptations. While the story of Gilgamesh has been so essential as to have survived for 4700 years, dating back to some of the oldest writings in the Bible, no modern English version was able to win over much critical conviction until David’s version. The work boosted him to national acclaim. It was through this book that I first encountered David’s name in 1994, when I was back in the States from France where I was living and teaching, and myself trying to translate the poems of Pierre de Ronsard, the great French Renaissance poet.

I remember the year was 1994, because it coincided with the 50th anniversary of the D-Day invasion in Normandy and my attention was being preoccupied by the Bayeux Tapestry and Robert Fitzgerald’s translations of Homer. Derek Walcott’s epic Omeros published in 1990 was getting a lot of attention at the time. So David’s Gilgamesh struck me as wonderfully appropriate to all that was in the air culturally and historically bridging past to present. Memory traditionally is such a key concept to poetry. Auden said poetry is “memorable speech.” The Greeks made Memory a goddess, Mnemosyne, and she was the mother of the 9 muses who principally inspire poets and the arts. David’s undergraduate studies at Amherst, in fact, were interrupted by service in World War II, and to have Gilgamesh published in the 50-year mark of that war must have meant and must mean something to him. Two other students at Amherst who would become well known for their poetry, James Merrill and Richard Wilbur, endured similar interruptions to their careers for the same cause.

It’s a big deal to have a poet of David Ferry’s depth in the art and renown read for our series. In April this past spring we celebrated the 100th anniversary of T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, with a magnificent reading by Lloyd Schwartz of that poem and of selections from Browning, Swinburne and Baudelaire, who had influenced Eliot. This is how it feels for me this evening. David has been a friend and supporter of my work, as he has been for many in the community. So it’s also with a great sense of personal appreciation that I stand here this evening to welcome him.

Red Letter Poem #182

 Red Letter Poem #182

 

 

 

 

 

In flight with Thoreau

 

 

I am awake between two sleeping people

their dreams swirl about me in the airplane air

restless in this rocking crib batted gently

by the hands of unenclosed winds

how many others sleep or read or scribble

in our little city hurtling through the sky

a baby cries without heart or conviction

this too seeps into the sleep of my seat mates

the baby tries another voice     its thin thread

straggles like the light in Thoreau’s winter pines

 

 

––Mary Buchinger

 

 

 

Don’t get me wrong: I have known the peace of wandering the pine-rimmed path around Walden Pond––when summer has passed, the swimmers and picnickers vanished, and a stillness returned.  I’ve relished placing my stone atop the always-mounting cairn beside the foundation of Thoreau’s cabin––and then retreating to the gentle slope to watch low sun creasing the waters.  But I have to confess I feel a similar sort of peace descending upon me––a deep welling of contentment, of anticipation, of (dare I say it) an almost holy attention––whenever that reminder comes crackling over the intercom “to make sure your seatbelts are fastened and the seats are in their upright and locked positions”, and we begin taxiing out to the runway.  Right then, the things you’ve left behind, the tasks undone, will remain so (at least for a while.)  What little you think you absolutely need has been crammed into a suitcase and secured somewhere out of reach.  And whatever sense of control you experience (real or imagined)––over momentary choices, future plans, or your very existence––has been ceded to other hands, other forces.  You look around at the anxious faces who share this space and cannot help but experience a certain sense of community knowing that, for a few hours at least, you will share a common fate.  Airborne, I’ll feel how small and fragile are all our elaborate dreams, as I gaze down at the minute cars inching along thoroughfares, and the neat rows of houses crammed together like kernels of corn.  In his writing, Thoreau experienced awestruck moments, humbled by nature’s encompassing power.  For many of us, the time spent being carried into the heavens on aluminum wings is as close as we come to spiritual surrender.

 

Mary Buchinger is a prize-winning poet who has authored seven collections of poetry, the newest being Navigating the Reach (from Ireland’s Salmon Poetry.)  She’s currently a professor of English and communication studies at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences in Boston; and she serves on the board of the venerable New England Poetry Club.  What I find most captivating about Mary’s writing is the nimble way she navigates an array of emotional, aesthetic, and even historical forces.  In a poem like today’s offering, she’s done away with punctuation so that ideas conjoin, diverge, buck as if negotiating turbulence, and then continue on-course toward some quiet clarity.  Did you admire, as I did, those lines: “a baby cries without heart or conviction/ this too seeps into the sleep of my seat mates”?  That string of long vowels and clipped consonants soothes the ear, contrasting to the unsettling implication of the words.  Is this, I wonder, how Henry David’s quiet desperation is first born inside our lives––when we intuit that we’re carried along by unknowable forces, and sleep is only a fleeting comfort?  So we look for something with which we can steady our thoughts––and perhaps we recall a passage from Walden like this: “After a still winter night I awoke with the impression that some question had been put to me, which I had been endeavoring in vain to answer in my sleep. . . But there was dawning Nature, in whom all creatures live, looking in at my broad windows with serene and satisfied face, and no question on her lips.”  Perhaps we tell ourselves we’ll embrace the open questions, attempt to appreciate what a few hours disconnected from our terrestrial lives may grant?  Clouds barge past our windows and, through the breaks, we glimpse the winter-darkened hills slipping beneath us.  It may be that our direction has long been determined––our only choice being whether or not we can appreciate the passage.  Thoreau goes on: “The snow lying deep on the earth dotted with young pines, and the very slope of the hill on which my house is placed, seemed to say, Forward!”  And carried by a similar momentum, we too continue the journey.

 

 

 

 

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