Red Letter Poem #177

 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 #177

 

 

 

 

Aubade Now of Earth

 

 

Sun on it again, at first tender.
The color of apricots ripening into.

 

At first there was more to eat, then suddenly less.

 

For one night only, naked in my arms,
wrote Beatriz of Dia, in twelfth-century Occitan,
to her longed-for lover.

 

Aubade now of earth.  Of water.  Of herons and fishes.

 

Dawn after dawn one night only, we woke in your arms.

 

 

                                   ––Jane Hirshfield 

 

 

 

It’s what we do, isn’t it–– we endlessly examine ourselves, compare our life to others, pass judgements.  And two of the most daunting questions we ask: what are we hoping to make from this life?  Then, at certain crucial junctures, we look back and wonder: what have we actually made (as if this will somehow reassure us of how well we’ve lived)?  Of course, this doesn’t just apply to poets and artists, but every conscious being––though it seems to me that the critical impulse runs especially strong in those individuals seeking entrance into the ancient guild of bards and dreamers.  I certainly remember, as a young poet, being awestruck by what ‘the greats’ had constructed, visiting the cathedrals that are Whitman’s and Dickinson’s collected works; Pound and Eliot; Frost, Bishop, and Stevens.  I imagined that each set out to construct just such an encompassing edifice––and it made me wonder if I’d ever build anything of real beauty (even if on a much more modest scale.)  Of course, it takes the accrual of years and reams of scribbled pages before any writer comes to even a moderate understanding of what they are, in fact, fashioning from the ephemeral materials of our craft––voice, image, music, longing, and the landscape of our inky imaginations

 

It would be understandable if Jane Hirshfield––poet, essayist, translator, educator, activist–– is experiencing one of those moments of reevaluation.  That’s because, last week, The Asking: New and Selected Poems 1971–2023 (Knopf), her tenth collection of poetry, appeared in bookstores.  It contains work from more than fifty years of her life; how could a poet not pause to consider what, precisely, she’s made from those lived decades?  As luck would have it, I was in California last week, and so I attended the launch reading for The Asking.  It was wonderful to experience, in one sitting, Jane’s ripening mind, her evolving voice, reflected in the broad selection she assembled for her listeners.  And, as with many of her earlier readings I’ve attended, hers was an audience who embraced these poems is if they were missives from an intimate. 

 

Afterward, in the Q&A session, a gentleman in the back asked Jane about what he perceived as the arduous work to attain those luminous visions, to remain open to moments of anguish or tenuous delight––and I could see how pleased the poet was by the question.  That’s because many readers seem to imagine that Jane’s poems––depicting the power of wonder and the glory of the commonplace––are a constant feature of her daily experience.  Likely, it’s our romanticized conception about the life of an acclaimed poet and practicing Buddhist.  So Jane seemed to relish the opportunity to speak about her continual struggles to be attentive to the weathers of the heart, to confront the harsh questions required by mortal experience.  This is the task before artists in all mediums: to embody their own individual responses to a host of mounting concerns: threats to the biosphere, to the cultural landscape, to the survival of all we love.  For Jane, it is only through daily practice, a stubborn and lifelong commitment, that she makes her way (occasionally, she reminds us) toward a restorative clarity and the sheltered harbor of the notebook.  And yet many of her poems have been so widely embraced, they’ve inspired conversations that cross borders and challenge authority.  Her poem “Let Them Not Say” became something of an international rallying cry for environmentalists.  And another, "On the Fifth Day", published soon after, not only went viral, it led also to the founding of a traveling, interactive installation, Poets for Science, championing the need for scientific study and imaginative daring––both of which are under attack in our polarized society

 

Later, in an e-exchange, I asked Jane whether she’d aspired all along for grand structures in her writing.  “I never had any ambition as a young poet for making a ‘body of work.’  All my life, all I've ever done was write the next poem.”  If there are themes and stylistic characteristics woven throughout these 300-plus pages, “they are the coherences of a life, not of prior decision.  Questions that interested me when I was ten still interest me.  Problems that felt important when I was twenty still do.  This moment's poem answers this moment's need.”  This is what I have long been attracted to in Jane’s work: not cathedrals, but the temple of a single breath, a simple shelter in which to appreciate the music of this present moment.  It seems to me she composes love poems to existence, mindful of how fragile is every embrace.  And then (if we’re lucky) the next breath, the next temple––the outstretched hands welcoming, even as they are letting go. 

 

 

 

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 Red Letters

 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

 

 

 

 

My Dear Readers,

 

I try my best not to skip Red Letter installments––but as we speak, I’m flying home from a family wedding in California.  So rather than leave you Letter-less, I decided to share an older piece that many newer readers will have missed (and old readers will likely savor a second time.)  Instead of ‘Throwback Thursday,’ this will be our second Flashback Friday!  Enjoy Adnan Onart’s’ richly-emotional time-bending memory

 

See you with a new poem next Friday!

 

 

 

 

 

Red Letter Poem #31

 

 

 

 

Not the least of poetry’s strengths (and delights) is its ability to allow us access to another reality: to stand for a few moments in someone else’s shoes, viewing the day through a surprising sensibility, our thoughts informed by a radically different sense of history.  This is one of the first things that attracted me to the poetry of Adnan Onart.  I will never experience the pain inflicted on Crimean Tatars as their country suffered invasions––vivid still in the long memories of his Turkish family––though some of his poems provide me with a mouthful of that anguish.  Nor can I feel those American eyes at my back in some street or market––in this, our post-9/11 circumstance––triggered only by the accent of my voice; but Adnan’s poetry has made me imagine what that tremor must be like.  Poetry confirms what most of us have long suspected: that our lives are dramatically different from each other and, paradoxically, utterly alike.  So it is with “Morning Prayer”––a poem that somehow reminded me of voices as disparate as that of Yehuda Amichai and Wislawa Szymborska.  When the young protagonist is instructed in the ways of prayer, I found something of my eight-year-old self re-awakened, and I remembered what I first yearned for in the world.  And when the much older speaker (an immigrant now in Boston) repeats that same gesture, I suddenly felt how sweet and unpredictable is the nature of our answered prayers.

Adnan lives in Boston, MA. and his work has appeared in a number of journals including Prairie Schooner, Colere Magazine, Red Wheel Barrow, and The Massachusetts Review. ”Morning Prayer” was published in his first poetry collection, The Passport You Asked For (The Aeolos Press), coupled with Kenneth Rosen’s Cyprus’ Bad Period.  He earned an honorable mention in the New England Poetry Club’s Erika Mumford Award, and was one of the winners of the 2011 Nazim Hikmet Poetry Competition.  Discouraged from poetry as a young man in Turkey, he has now begun to find an appreciative audience in his adoptive land.  Talk about paradoxes.

 

Morning Prayer

 

In a poor Istanbul neighborhood, 

at the ground floor of our house, 

my great-grandmother says: 

It is time for morning prayer.

 

If you pray, she says, pure as a child, 

from this corner of the room, 

an angel will appear.

 

I am five years old closing my eyes. 

Allahü Ekber.

 

Essallamü alleyküm ve rahmetullah. 

I am fifty opening my eyes.

 

In Boston, Massachusetts, 

in a not so poor neighborhood 

at the top floor of our house 

praying my morning prayer.

 

From that corner of the room, 

my great-grandmother appears.

 

                    ­­–– Adnan Adam Onart

 

 

 

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

Review of Prayer for the French Republic, a play by Joshua Harmon

               Left to right: Jesse Kodama, Jared Troilo, Phyllis Kay, Peter Van Wagner, Tony Estrella

Review of Prayer for the French Republic, a play by Joshua Harmon

At Huntington Theater through October 8, 2023

By Andy Hoffman

The Huntington Theater presents a new play by Joshua Harmon, Prayer for the French Republic, an extraordinary evening of theater. This ambitious drama concerns a family of French Jews and the uncertainty Jews everywhere feel about wherever they live. We may be comfortable now, the play posits, but for how long? We can look back to violent acts of antisemitism and ask ourselves, “Are we safe? Might we be safer somewhere else?”

Brother and sister Patrick Salomon and Marcelle Salomon Benhamou represent two sides of the problem. Patrick has assimilated to the extent that neither he nor his children observe Jewish holidays. Marcelle, on the other hand, married an Algerian Jew and described herself to a visiting young American cousin, Molly, as ‘traditional.’ Both Marcelle and her husband Charles are successful physicians, he with a large practice and she as psychiatry department head. Their two adult children, Elodie and Daniel, still live with them. Charles says of his family that they lived in Algeria for 500 years, and in Spain for a thousand years before that, marking the family’s movement around the Mediterranean with the Spanish Inquisition and the rise of Islamic Nationalism. The Benhamou family finds its peace disturbed in the beginning of the play when Daniel comes home having been attacked on the street, largely because as a math teacher at a Jewish school he wears a kippah, a skull cap. The elections involving the National Front leader Marie Le Pen and Donald Trump in the US have put the Benhamous on high alert. Charles no longer feels safe and wants the family to emigrate to Israel.

They live in the apartment that Marcelle and Patrick grew up in, and these characters share the stage with their ancestors, those who survived the Holocaust. Irma and Adolphe Salomon, the great-grandparents lived out the war trapped in the relative quiet of their Paris apartment, but their children have either escaped or fallen victim to the Nazis, and the old people pass their time imagining their offspring safe and sound. They are not, of course, not all of them. Those that do take up the century-old family business, selling pianos.

For these French Jews, the Holocaust remains as much a part of their personal history as their piano stores. Pierre marries a Catholic woman, and Patrick too marries outside the faith, but even he has not forgotten. As the play’s narrator, Patrick – admirably presented by Tony Estrella, the Artistic Director of Rhode Island’s Gamm Theater, which recently produced Harmon’s Bad Jews­ – regales the audience with stories of slaughter of Jews in France as far back as the Crusades. The felt vulnerability of the Benhamou family drives Prayer for the French Republic to its moving conclusion.

Harmon’s script, while long, flies along. These families, like all families, fight and argue and love, and we see plainly how people who are on the same side can vehemently, sometimes destructively, disagree. Prayer for the French Republic produces laughs and tears as the family struggles with and for its past and future. As they celebrate shabbat, Hannukah, and Passover, teaching their American cousin her own lost traditions, we feel the vital importance of both where they come from and where they are going. It’s a brilliant play, and Huntington Artistic director Loretta Greco has conducted the production and its talented cast to near perfection. The only hiccup in the evening is a peculiar break twenty minutes from the end, when the curtain comes down and the audience felt uncertain whether there was more to the show. Even with this misstep, Prayer for the French Republic should go on your must-see list. It tells a complicated and necessary story, not just about Jews, but about a world in migration. However we come down on the mass movement of people from the America’s north to the US, or African to Europe and the Middle East, or South Asians on the run from climate change, this play opens our eyes and hearts to the painful uncertainty of life.