Red Letter Poem #193

 

 

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 #193

 

 

 

 

Unveiling in Snow

 

                          (to my sister)

 

 

Because you and I never did sit on a park bench

chatting, or stroll happily along rowdy city streets

browsing, or hopscotch chalked sidewalks together,

 

or read the same articles or books; and because

in our so-called adult lives, we never sang together

except all of us at family birthdays; never said things

 

that implied love; also because, though for years

we shared our childhood bedroom, the twin spool beds

our mother doggedly sanded and refinished, we didn’t—

 

that I remember—share jokes or sisterly confidences;

because I was older, I who unwittingly determined

what we were together—we were more separate

 

in our bond than our differences would have made

inevitable; because together we weathered the tempests

of our mother’s house—because because because

 

because I can’t say the cause, these words I keep to myself

this raw February day your stone’s unveiled—I,

the elder, this Gail who tried to exonerate herself then,

 

still trying to forgive herself now.

 

 

                         ––Gail Mazur

 

 

 

Concerning the loss of someone dear to us––and between the time of the burial ceremony and the placement of a headstone––a certain interval must occur.  There seems to be less regulation in Christian practice about how long this period must be.  But in the Jewish tradition, the ‘unveiling’ ceremony––a familial gathering where the carved grave marker is uncovered, formally dedicated, and celebrated with prayer––takes place sometime between the end of Sheloshim (the first month of mourning) and Yahrzeit (the anniversary of that death.)  And in that gap, the bereaved are undergoing a sort of transformation: having first removed themselves from their customary day-to-day existence, they are focused on fully experiencing the absence of the deceased; then slowly, over time, they are both ritualizing remembrance while preparing to fully return to the communal world.  Case in point: Gail Mazur’s new poem is a lyrical meditation about the tribulations of sisterhood and the unfathomability of loss.  Having lost three sisters of my own, how could I not be captivated by Gail’s poetic unburdening––though, being male, I know the emotional connection to my siblings was different from what sisterhood entails.  But the poem, in its cyclical attempts at definition and expiation, will likely feel like familiar territory to anyone who has had to bury a loved one and was left to come to terms with all that follows.

 

Gail, I’m sure, needs little introduction to Red Letter readers; her eight fine volumes have become mainstays of contemporary poetry.  In 2020 she published Land’s End: New and Selected Poems (University of Chicago Press) which amply displays the richness and refined sensibility of this highly-regarded poet.  I would like to note, though, that she also had an exceptional career as a teacher of young writers––in Boston University’s MFA program and at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.  And as founder of the Blacksmith House Poetry Series (still going strong after five decades), she created an honored institution where both acclaimed and emerging talents could engage with the literary community and offer their new work.  

 

In today’s poem, I found myself taken by the litany of that word because, each mention heralding another new glimpse into the lives of these two girls––an agenda dominated (by the speaker’s own admission) by the strong will of that older sister.  Did you feel that tension between control and surrender all through the poem?  It’s as if the piece was trying to hold back some of the tidal guilt that now spills over the dam of old justifications.  The diction of the piece swings back and forth between a rational, almost legalistic tone (“because, though for years/ we shared our childhood bedroom. . .we didn’t—// that I remember—share jokes or sisterly confidences”), and the more expected childhood parlance of “rowdy city streets” and “chalked sidewalks” for games of hopscotch.  This inner conflict seems to both activate and undercut the thought process unfolding until, with that hammering iambic “because because because// because”, the barrier begins to crumble.  Even the tightly-bundled tercets must give way, at the end, for one solitary survivor estranged from the body of the poem.  Perhaps this piece suggests that, over and over––as the memories return to us, as the poem is read and reread, as snows blanket the land and then withdraw––we experience a succession of unveilings, each one bringing us a little closer to the devastating psychic wounds we all carry, even as we make another small gesture toward healing, toward that elusive forgiveness, and the possibility of peace.

 

 

 

 

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 A Case for the Existence of God, a play by Samuel D. Hunter

 

A Case For the Existence of God

Review of A Case for the Existence of God, a play by Samuel D. Hunter

Calderwood Pavilion through February 17, 2024

By Andy Hoffman

If you can, catch A Case for the Existence of God at Calderwood Pavilion, a production of the Speakeasy Stage. The two-person play by MacArthur Award winner Samuel D. Hunter hardly ever mentions God or God’s possible existence, but it does explore the birth and growth of male friendship, about which we have so few stories. Masterfully directed in a confined space by Melinda Lopez, A Case for the Existence of God delivers a surprising gut-punch as two men begin to build the foundation of a friendship.

Set in Twin Falls, Idaho, Keith and Ryan meet to discuss a mortgage. Keith – Black and gay in a community that embraces neither identity – is a mortgage broker. The son of a well-to-do lawyer. Keith does his job with efficient responsibility. He studied English and early music in college, but found no paying call for his passions, so he helps arrange loans for people buying property. Ryan needs such help: he wants to acquire some land near town, land that once belonged to his family. Ryan’s family, though, has a long and convoluted history of mental illness and drug abuse, so his anxiety over the deal leads him into uncertainty and confusion as Keith explains the mortgage process. Keith loses his patience and tells Ryan “You either play by the rules and pretend it all means something, or you don’t get anything. That’s most of what being an adult is.” 

The two men met at the day-care center their daughters attend. When the play begins, the girls are a bit over a year old, and the men are in their thirties. They both grew up in Twin Falls and it later emerges that Keith remembers Ryan from high school; he was a popular kid with no time or interest in a nerdy, gay, Black classmate. Having met again all these years later, they find common ground as fathers. Fatherhood has pressured Ryan into this land-ownership adventure: divorce looms for Ryan and his wife, and he realizes that he needs a more stable living situation if he hopes to maintain any custody right over Christa, his daughter. Keith also feels uncertain about his ties to daughter Willa. After years of unsuccessfully trying to adopt, Keith chooses to foster the infant daughter of a addict mother, with the ambition of eventually becoming the baby’s legal parent. Both men live on hope, but they live in a world short on deliverance. The play’s case for the existence of God depends on the realization of hope, but humans have limited vision into the workings of the divine.

The performance reveals the story over a period of months, as each man’s hopes encounter trouble. As their hopes fade and grow, so does the newborn friendship between them. Lighting changes signify movement from scene to scene. Most of the action takes place in Keith’s cubicle at work, but as their friendship grows the stage becomes first Keith’s home and then Ryan’s, a playground for the toddler girls and even the wide-open land Ryan wants to acquire. The audience follows the relationship as it transitions from the powder-keg of a mortgage broker’s office to the brightly lit Idaho landscape. A Case for the Existence of God both reveals and revels in the growth from the immediate and transactional first breath of friendship to the life-long and transcendent maturity of this bond. The final scene of the play takes us into a hopeful future, but I will allow you to experience that joy for yourself.

De’Lon Grant mesmerizes as the uptight Keith. You feel Keith’s hemmed in life, from the cubicle at work to his tenuous position with Willa. As he notes, Twin Falls does not have many romantic opportunities for him. He depends on the emotional support of his father, whom he mentions frequently. Grant portrays a man in need of the friendship he cultivates with Ryan despite the differences back in high school. Jesse Hinson embraces Ryan to such a degree that I felt worried for his mental stability and his resistance to his dead parents’ addictions. He feels victimized by the world and the lines on his face reveal a map of uncertainty as he negotiates adulthood dreadfully short on the personal resources he needs. I only realized the brilliance of his performance when he and his co-star came out for their applause and the lines on his face disappeared. 

Samuel D. Hunter has created a brilliant script that neatly slides from the pedestrian to the angelic. Best known for The Whale, the film version of which netted Brenden Fraser an Oscar for lead actor, Hunter’s script casually and captivatingly engages the audience in its difficult subjects with beauty, ease, and love. I hope you get to feel the wings of uplift he provides in A Case for the Existence of God.

Red Letter Poem #192

  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 #192

 

 

 Career

Some days, I want to withdraw my submission to the world,

and write a note that says Sorry, but I’ve been taken elsewhere.

But where? Three hundred million potentially habitable planets,

according to the latest NASA research, and not one of them

within reach.

Here, on earth, my left hand rests in sunlight and

my right hand rests in shade. These stained New England granites,

lying in their fencerows since the golden years of the Enlightenment,

make good places to sit and watch the ecosystem collapse.

Which it does, but very slowly, like crown glass flowing in a windowpane,

or in staccato bursts, like hydrocarbon fire.

The oxidizing rivers,

the dried-up streams, the dream of an eternal Arden blown

like milkweed silk that settles on the mirror of an algaed lake,

the sun reclining in its bowl of beaten gold—so beautiful,

these end-of-the-millennium days. I think of Newark seen in passing

from the interstate, when sunlight floods the scalped terrain

adjacent to the marshlands, smearing all the factories with titian,

verdigris, and rose.

Suppose I dug a hole and sowed my poem,

deep in an alluvium of peat and ash, and someone in the aftertime

unearthed it, legible despite the stains and degradation, and read it,

if they could. That reader—dark, intelligent, a little smaller than a human,

clad in homemade boots and a range coat made of tawny leather—

might recognize how much I loved the world, although the language

might have sounded strange, and how some days I carried hope

in my mouth like a small gray stone, and how some days

I could hardly stand it, how the world had changed,

and how despite it all I never gave in. This is that person’s poem.

I submit it to them.

 

 

                         ––Jonathan Weinert

 

 

For years, I had a favorite New Yorker cartoon pinned beside my writing desk.  Sadly, dear reader, I may have to spoil the punchline with explanation since, I fear, only older writers will even remember the subject matter being portrayed.  In ancient days, before services like Submittable were established (through which most current magazines electronically receive writers’ literary offerings), we’d have to manually reproduce our poems and stories by pounding with fingertips on devices called typewriters (perhaps you’ve seen them in old movies.)  Then we’d neatly fold the printed pages into envelopes, remembering to squeeze in an additional ‘self-addressed stamped envelope’ so that a rejected manuscript could be returned.  And when that SASE showed up in the mailbox (sadly far too often), usually the only communication from the magazine was a printed form letter or card, usually with the same annoyingly-disingenuous apology.  Now, picture this: in the cartoon, a writer’s wall is plastered with a hundred notes of various shapes and sizes––with one small vacant spot in the center.  Prominent on his desk is a full-sized newly-received letter whose stationery logo resembles that of the New Yorker itself.  The poet (as I like to imagine him) is busy typing out his response: “Dear Editor, Regretfully, I have to return your recent rejection slip.  It does not meet our current needs.”

The cartoon produced a rueful laugh, our shared desperation turned to levity.  Jonathan Weinert’s new poem cheekily relies on a more current bit of jargon: when, in this age of mass electronic submissions, your poem is miraculously accepted by one journal, the power dynamic is quietly reversed.  You are now obligated to write to all the other magazines, letting those benighted editors know: sorry, your magazine could have relished my recent masterpiece, but you’re too late.  Except, in this case, Jonathan seems to be withdrawing––not simply a poem––but the contribution of his whole being to this failed human endeavor.  Questions abound: is this poet resting in some Colonial churchyard, gazing at the New England landscape?  Is he living still or a tremulous shadow?  Did you thrill, as I did, to his vivid descriptions of a once-unsullied world?  Did you begin to feel a little unmoored in time, our Edenic past and devastating present interwoven?  “Suppose I dug a hole and sowed my poem,” the speaker proposes, mired in his quiet Thoreauvian desperation––and now an imagined future-world enters the picture.  And what would some being from the “aftertime” make of our angst (poetic and otherwise)?  How painful, to look back to a time when a shift in our behavior might have saved the planet––yet we remained (blindly or selfishly) unchanged? 

Jonathan is hardly alone in his despair nor in his appeal to some future listener, likely confounded by our choices.  I immediately thought of Jane Hirshfield’s marvelous poem “Let Them Not Say” which became something of an international Green anthem: “Let them not say: we did not see it./ We saw. . ./ Let them not say: they did nothing./ We did not-enough.”  Jonathan––let me hurry to say–– is the author of three fine poetry collections.  A Slow Green Sleep was the winner of Saturnalia Books’ Editors Prize; and In the Mode of Disappearance was awarded the Nightboat Poetry Prize.  He is also the co-editor of Until Everything Is Continuous Again: American Poets on the Recent Work of W. S. Merwin, celebrating that masterly American visionary.   But fearing the insufficiency of his efforts, the speaker here is in danger of submitting to the overwhelming forces (and don’t those double entendres like ‘withdraw’ and ‘submit’ attain a marvelous resonance!)  He offers his heart instead to those who may follow our failed efforts, still clinging to the wounded Earth.  This poem is, by his own admission, far more discursive than his customary style, arising perhaps from his frustration; but he’s leavened the pain with a dash of humor and a still-flickering hope.  So, for this occasion, I’ve dusted off my old Smith Corona: “Dear Mr. Weinert, I am writing on behalf of Red Letter readers.  It is without regret that I must reject the interment of your poetry.  We find it bracing and beautiful and absolutely necessary.  If we are to have any chance of survival, we need honest voices that remind us of our humanity, of our stewardship of this green world.  Your poem, most assuredly, meets our current needs.”

 

 

 

 

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

Uyghur Poems, ed.Aziz Isa Elkun, trans.Aziz Isa Elkun & Others

 Uyghur Poems, ed.Aziz Isa Elkun, trans.Aziz Isa Elkun & Others, Everyman Library

Pocket Poets, Alfred A. Knopf: New York, London, Toronto, 2023

Reviewed by Karen Klein

This publication is significant as it is not only the first English language anthology of

Uyghur poetry, but also an overview of the history, culture, and poetics of the Uyghur people, which is admirably provided in the introduction by poet, editor, and translator Aziz Isa Elkun. Most English speaking persons in the West are only aware of the Uyghurs due to media reports of Chinese oppression and persecution of them. Confined to their native Xinjiang region, put in reeducation camps, their children taken from them to boarding schools, not allowed to practice Islam, their language and customs discour- aged, they are subjected to forced assimilation. To open our minds to this Turkic group, once an empire in Central Asia through which the ancient Silk Road passed, carrying material goods and knowledge cross continents and cultures, and to expand our knowledge of their rich poetic tradition is this anthology’s gift.

The editor has divided Uyghur poems into three time periods: Classic Poems(BCE to 1900),Modern Poems(1900 to 1960), Contemporary Poems(1960 to 2022) with the most

famous in the period of Classic poems. Uyghur poetry, like that of most ancient cultures, begins in the epic poems of the oral tradition. Tales of rulers, wars, heroes and saints were recited publicly by bards and sung by musicians. Carried down through generations, these poems carried Uyghur history. Script came in the Sixth Century BCE; by the Tenth Century CE, the epic Oghuzname, the exploits of Oghuz Khan, was preserved in Uyghur script. The Bard writes of a woman ”as beautiful as a fairy” whom the hero marries and the ferocity of his warriors: “The grey wolf will be our battle spirit.” Similar themes of love and war dominate the Homeric epics. This anthology includes fragments of Oghuz story and that of Alp Er Tunga, meaning Warrior Man Tiger, a mythical hero possibly historic, and several examples of wisdom poetry, similar to instruction for young noblemen, e.g. the Mirror for Princes, in Western Europe.

Uyghur acceptance of Islam in the Tenth Century CE brought new poetic subjects of spirituality and religion; script gradually became more widespread in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries, including the formerly oral folk poetry, now written in quatrains, a poetic form Uyghur poets of the Modern and Contemporary Periods continue to use.

Persian and Arabic traditions, including Arabic script, influenced Uyghur poets as did their adaptation in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries of the Sufi poetic tradition into Turkic language. Poems of the Central Asian poet of Uyghur descent, Ali-Shir Nava’i are still recited and he is venerated as among the best of their poets. Writing in the formal poetic style of the ghazal, the most common verse form in the Sufi tradition, a style contemporary American poets, for example Adrienne Rich, have used, limits the poet up to fifteen couplets with a rhyme scheme of AA, BA, CA, DA, EA, FA, GA, etc. The same end word in the two lines of the first couplet is repeated as the end word in each second line of the successive couplets. Formal limitations do not, however, limit the emotional impact of these poems of love, beauty, and loss or separation from the beloved. This loss can operate metaphorically--the beloved as a beautiful woman or the beloved as Divine love.

Fourteen ghazals by Ali-Shir Nava’i are included in this anthology, thirteen of them are translated from Uzbek by Dennis Daly and taken from his Twenty-one Ghazals by Alishir Navoiy(Cervena Barva Press, 2016). Daly, a well-known writer and poet, is admired by many friends and fellow poets in the Greater Boston area. His translations follow the ghazal form to the letter; the A words reflect the themes of these love poems: eyes, heart, face, fire, fate, night, beauty, heaven, one, beloved, pearl, joy, and pain. It is curious that only one of the thirteen ghazals has pain as its end word on all the lines when so many ofthese poems speak to the misery of the poet, often addressing himself:

Speak up, Navoiy, has love injured your very soul?

Do you bleed your love? Is there no help from heaven?

I don’t read Uyghur, so can’t comment on the accuracy of Daly’s translations. But he has remained faithful to the form Ali-Shir Nava’i chose, and the translations work on their own as poems with wonderful, sometimes startling, images: Your eyelashes found a fatalspot in my heart, or the love song with the end word eyes where the image extends into a bizarre action, explicable only, perhaps, as the eye of heaven, the dark, infinite eyes, an exchange of spiritual love, a mystical exchange of tears, the beloved the image of Divine Love:

Your eyes

Burn into mine until brimmed with salt-spiked tears

Which flow, unburdened, into the channels of your eyes.

Navoiy’s poems of yearning love, of joining Those who suffer, lovers all, are not always laments. In a couplet that poignantly universalizes an emotional state which ends one of the Love Songs, he again addresses himself: Navoiy, why do you complain of meetings and partings? Give thanks for those long moments that still fill your heart.

There are noticeable changes when moving from the poets in the large section of Classic Poems(BCE to 1900)to fewer poems in the Modern section(1900-1960). The strict ghazal form isn’t used, but there are couplets and quatrains in the poems, many are political and speak of the resistance struggle of Uyghurs against the Chinese. Lutpulla Mutellip, poet and journalist, before Chinese police executed him at 22, wrote on a wall with his blood:

This bloodthirsty devil has turned the bloom of my youth into

a withered leaf…

Women appear not only as symbols of the earthly or Divine beloved, but also as fightersA poem from 1943 is addressed To My Daughter, the War Nurse. She was Rizwange who died at 19 on the front lines rescuing wounded by the Chinese Nationalist Army. And the first woman poet included, Melike Ziyawudun, with a love poem from 1957in which she confesses I always read your poems, I learned your secrets from your poems, and teases that she might not only love his poems, but him as well.

-3-

Most of the anthologized poets are included in the largest section Contemporary Poems(1960 to 2022). These young poets, born in the Twentieth Century, are the continuance of an old culture, now under suppression. Many have fled or left for different countries. Mahmut Abduramanov speaks for so many, writes of their diaspora My Uyghurs, you are scattered all over the world, but the longing for their formerly immense Motherland for the river Tarim, the is intense: We are moths drawn to the fire of our homeland. In his famous poem, The World in the  City of Kashgar, Abdul Tunyaz writes Every night in the Berlin sky/You see Uyghur eyes in every star and concludes his poem:

The homeless birds

Cry for the seasons, calling for their homeland

While the wandering wind carries

Leaves of its own.

The editor notes that in the last decades of the Twentieth Century, Uyghur poems show the influence of Russian poetry with modernism, post-modernism, free verse. Many women poets are included; their stories of fighting the Chinese, of persecution, of being taken away to re-education camps, of their deaths are heartbreaking. Some are like the Blue Shirt, whom Armet Igamberdi commemorated in his poem for the unknown heroine of the protest on July 5, 2009 when women came out to demand where family members were. Like the Russian women poets they might have read, Akmatova, Tsveteva, they show resistance and love. Zeynure Isa writes: I wish to become the flagpole/Of a flag we wave for freedom; as the editor of a publishing house, Chemingul Awut was sent to a Chines re-education camp in July 2018 and poet/activist Muyesser Abdul’ehed’s debut novel depicts the detention camps. Rahile Kamal writes Because I miss you, I fall like rain. Teacher Risalet Merdan claims Today is a day to write poems, while Gunisa Imin Gulkhan, sentenced to seventeen years in prison for her ‘separatist’ poetry writes of women prisoners: They don’t want to shed their tears…. They want to talk about it with someone on the outside. Gunaz Saydullayeva’s poem begins Mother cut her own umbilical cord because the strict Chinese policy of birth-control makes couples hide one too many. Since 2017, that policy has relaxed, but forced sterilization of Uyghur women has been reported.

The forms of these contemporary poems are stanzaic, mostly quatrains, but I must mention a single, perfect ghazal by Ekhmetian Osman that shows the persistence for love poetry of a traditional form and includes an image from the old battle poems: The wolf of life begins to howl each time I take you in my arms.

Editor Aziz Isa Elkun has done a commendable job in compiling this book, translating many of the poems, writing a splendid introduction, providing biographies for most of the poets and important facts from contemporary Uyghur history of resistance to Chinese attempts to deny them a state and to obliterate their cultural identity. He concludes the anthology with several of his own poems, so he should have the last word. The final poem, about the roses he planted, concludes:

My roses are blossoming with hope

Singing a song of freedom