Red Letter Poem #250

 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 #250

 

 

 

 

Valentine to Jimmy Piersall

Even if you hadn’t cracked a hundred homers

and rounded the bases backwards,

even if your mitt couldn’t reach

from the starstruck green of center field

straight up to Mars

to snatch fly balls from the sky,



I would have loved you.



Because you feared no one. Because

when your chest pushed up against an umpire’s

words did not fumble in your mouth

but hurled like a stream of tobacco spit.



I was small, had yet to find my voice.


––Susan Eisenberg

There is a reason we create grand statuary––and place them high on pedestals, above the ground we mortals walk upon. We elevate these expressions of the extraordinary so everyone will have to lift their eyes to see them, their glorious heads haloed by sun and sky. These days, true heroes (and, to be clear I’m referring to towering figures of any gender; the term heroines has come to have a diminished stature of late) are an increasingly rare commodity. In this encompassing media landscape, it seems we quickly begin uncovering their flaws and failings even while the marble or bronze is being unveiled. Some even suggest that people first exalt their heroes so that, subsequently, they can have the pleasure of tearing them down. But the societal need to discover and spotlight our champions––those who are born with extraordinary gifts, or work diligently to perfect their skills, or stand with an unswerving commitment to some enduring principle: this is quite an interesting thing to consider and is brought to mind by Susan Eisenberg’s delightful new poem.



In our cultural climate, sports figures are often accorded the hero’s laurels; but Susan is recalling a simpler time (before mind-boggling half-billion-dollar contracts, and ESPN fanfare.) She’s celebrating the great Jimmy Piersall who signed his first baseball contract with the Boston Red Sox at age eighteen and, in 1950, was one of the youngest players to ever play the game. (I should add that Susan, a Cleveland girl, first saw him play during his time with the Indians.) Piersall became an All-Star center fielder but excelled at the plate as well (he still holds the Sox record for garnering 6 hits in a single nine-inning game.) Yet his behavior often extended beyond the capricious, becoming erratic and sometimes violent. He would get involved in brawls, on and off the field, which led several times to minor league demotions. Still, his career spanned 17 years, playing for five teams. But one of his most lasting impacts came with the publication of his memoir Fear Strikes Out; in it, he revealed that he suffered from bipolar disorder and had experienced a mental breakdown––but determinedly fought his way back to health and the sport he loved. This was at a time when sports figures kept such ‘dark’ secrets hidden from the public, but Piersall’s honesty helped so many suffering their own double lives.



Susan, you may know, is a poet and retired electrician; she’s the author of five poetry collections, most recently, Stanley’s Girl (Cornell)––as well as the nonfiction (and New York Times Notable) book, We’ll Call You If We Need You: Experiences of Women Working Construction. When I first came across her poetry, I was impressed how her verse often celebrated the blue-collar working experience in a country not always appreciative of its labors. But now Susan is also a visual artist, oral historian, and a Resident Scholar at Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center––which, to my mind, begins to flirt with hero-status. Her poem today touches on Piersall’s gleeful on-field antics. Not surprisingly, this felt thrilling to a young girl who might not feel so free to express what was curtained off inside the mind. “Because you feared no one. Because/ when your chest pushed up against an umpire’s/ words did not fumble in your mouth...”. The possibility that authority might be defied and unbridled individuality expressed––this was, perhaps, the first liberating poem seeded in Susan’s consciousness. And its relevance today is underscored by the news story just unfolding from a current Red Sox outfielder, Jarren Duran. He revealed in a new documentary that he was almost broken by his sense of failure and, in 2022, attempted suicide. We are overjoyed that he was unsuccessful––not only because he has since become a marvelous player (voted MVP of the 2024 MLB All-Star game), but because the emotional courage he is displaying today will likely save other lives.



All this makes me think of the friends of mine suffering devastating illness, or acting as caretakers for spouses struggling with debilitating conditions. It brings to mind all the artists I know who persist in producing new instances of beauty and delight, even when the world seems determined to ignore them. And still others, determined to stand up for our democratic republic when dark forces are attempting to shatter its ideals. Heroics, Susan reminds us, come in many unexpected forms, and have an effect on people which no one could have anticipated. ‘Finding our voice.’ These, here, are my modest statues built of ink and breath. Am I wrong to think that––right now, dear readers––your minds are serving as their pedestals?

 

 

 

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 BlueSky

@stevenratiner.bsky.social

and on Twitter          

@StevenRatiner

 

And coming soon:

a new website to house all the Red Letter archives at StevenRatiner.com

The Organizing Music in Robert Pinsky’s poem ‘Branca’

 

A Handpicked Poem

by Michael Todd Steffen

The Organizing Music in Robert Pinsky’s poem ‘Branca’

Who the heck is Ralph Branca? Well, as baseball fans (and there are poets among this group) may know, Branca was a not bad, not bad at all pitcher in the Major Leagues between 1944 and 1956, with the Brooklyn Dodgers, the Detroit Tigers, and finally with the New York Yankees. The specific moment of Branca’s career that still registers with us is that he gave up the game-winning homerun to Bobby Thompson of the New York Giants in a 1951 playoff game, and that hit became known as The Miracle of Coogan’s Bluff, and also as The Shot Heard Around the World

The poem is not merely about defeat and failure, it’s about widely-witnessed and soul-crushing defeat and failure.

After he gave up the most famous homerun ever,

Back in the clubhouse Branca lay weeping, face down.

The poem appears in Pinsky’s most recent collection Proverbs of Limbo, published last June (2024) by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

It is a poem typically rife with subjects for discussion. I just wanted to make this one note about the stunning topical variety of the poem and how its immediate appearance of random organization, which keeps us on the edge of our seats as we read, still maintains our trust with its rhythmical consistency. Life is crazy, we need something to hang onto. Kids prepare to confront crazy love and mortality with poetry:

Ring around the rosies,

Pocket full of posies,

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

Similarly the poem ‘Branca’ conjures life’s falls, with a dazzling variety of facts about Ralph Branca, importantly as to his identity as a human being associated with so much more than that moment of failure which has been etched in history, or baseball lore. The poet will also take the opportunity to make statements about himself in the ramble of his data:

His father was an immigrant from Calabria.

These words are those of Robert Pinsky. Speaking.

Why these two pieces of information are joined in the same couplet? Seemingly for no reason at all, and there’s a great indulgence these days of being unburdened by reason or coherence. However, the two do go quite profoundly together, as they each evoke origin of the man, his father of the biological Ralph Branca, Robert Pinsky as another, different source of Ralph Branca in the poem itself which will extend and expand on the pitcher’s living repute as a man, in details, much more than just the notorious baseball pitcher, otherwise diminished to a needle of failure in the haystack of historical addenda.

When we read through the poem, we notice an end-line or “heroic” based versification, with the little hiccup, in most of the lines, of a dactyl or anapest (however you score it)—

Branca wore Dodger uniform number 13.

Speaking is the punchline of a Jewish joke.

Some Romans call Calabrians “Africani.”

Brooklyn has its own daily, the Brooklyn Eagle.

At eighty-five Branca learned about his mother.

He was twenty-one when Robinson joined the Dodgers…

That versification holds the very remote and difficult associations between the two lines of each couplet stable, so to speak, and keeps us going along with it even as we’re wondering, perhaps squirming, about the sense of the organization or logic of the poem, however our nature to just swallow language. Again, as poets and readers of poetry, it can be a gimme to revel in madness. But if folks are going to start talking about the poem, that is if the poem is to stand a chance to stay with us, in memory, as Branca himself somewhat obscurely has, we need to find sense in it. The editors of The New Yorker found sense enough to publish it in March 2017.

The music or prosody of the Greek-ish lines begins to work on us subconsciously as a sort of coherence. When we look closer, associations emerge: unlucky number 13 and the (mortal) laugh in a joke; a Roman colloquialism and a town’s daily journal both vehicles of hearsay or facts; late in life “At eighty-five” balanced with early career “He was twenty-one”…

The poem will be the challenge and subject of this week’s poetry discussion forum Let’s Talk About a Poem hosted by Somerville Poet Laureate Lloyd Schwartz via Zoom, on Saturday April 12 at 11a.m. Robert Pinsky will be “there” to read ‘Branca’ and take part in the discussion. For more information and a link to join, contact Marita Coombs at maldencirc@gmail.com.

Red Letter Poem #249

 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 #249

 

 

 

Brief Candle

for Linda Segal-Crawley


I’d like to walk you back to orioles

gorging on spring catkins

under the willow’s sweep.

I’d like to sit with you on the Great Lawn.

Puck and the fairies bless the palace,

the same amphitheater where

Lady MacBeth could not remove the spot.

So beautiful and so terrible, both—

you whispered your last night,

when I leaned in close, still hopeful.



I’d like to be the idiot in the field

who doesn’t know the guitar

has no strings, and plays the song

of a soft-bodied fly,

trapped in amber.

You’ve freed yourself

from your body, from the hospital room

where they spun your blood

into fine particles, no space

between sunrise, and fall of breath.



––Jennifer Markell



At first glance, it’s an unlikely pairing: spring. . .and elegy. But it’s a juxtaposition with a long literary tradition. For every sunny Wordsworth trumpeting: “It was an April morning: fresh and clear/ The Rivulet, delighting in its strength. . .,” you have a sullen Eliot intoning: “April is the cruellest month, breeding/ Lilacs out the of the dead land. . ..” It is not only the literal regeneration of the landscape that conjures, in most minds, hope and possibility; it’s the ubiquitous snare of pop song patter and rom-com uplift that seems determined to weld the season to beauty and love, banishing colder thoughts. But when you’ve suffered a deep loss, April is a kind of repudiation of our most innocent expectations: yes, from winter’s gray clutches, the daffodils erupt again––but meanwhile, the dead remain adamantly dead, and dare you to even consider entertaining thoughts of joy. Yet here––at the start of April and National Poetry Month––Jennifer Markell attempts to do just that in this poignant tribute to her beloved aunt, Linda Segal-Crawley: actor, playwright, charismatic role model. On a quiet spring day like the ones we’ve been experiencing this week, her aunt succumbed to multiple myeloma––and the seasonal narrative was forever altered in the poet’s mind. But the creation of a memory poem offers the heart and mind a third option: between celebration and despair, there is the mercurial possibility of creation–– or should I say recreation––of our unfolding now.



Jennifer’s poem begins with a marvelously lyrical phrase that’s emblematic of this life/death intersection: “orioles/ gorging on spring catkins/ under the willow’s sweep.” To me, this wishful ‘walking back’ she describes feels more observed than remembered, a present experience of an old ache. There we are, caught up in the action: sitting with her aunt on the Great Lawn enjoying Shakespeare in the Park in the heart of Manhattan. And I’d be surprised if you, too, weren’t remembering how thrilling it was when some older family member or friend took you under their wing and introduced you to a world beyond your horizon. With the lightest touch, the poet teases out possibilities; one moment, we’re imagining the delightful reverie of a “Midsummer’s Night,” and the next we’re in the windswept Scottish Highlands where Macbeth will meet his fate. The dictates of time and space are subordinate to the mood propelling us. We’re stilled by her aunt’s somber observation––So beautiful and so terrible, both—but the poem allows that feeling to slowly morph into a kind of freedom, an escape from the hospital ward, untethered to the body’s suffering. As Shakespeare’s “brief candle” gutters, we land somewhere “between sunrise, and fall of breath.” This speaker’s life is now permanently imbued with the past (or elements of it,) even while she is contemplating what new possibility is being uncovered at the tip of her pen.



Jennifer’s first poetry collection, Samsara, (from Turning Point) was named a “Must Read” by the Massachusetts Book Awards in 2015. Her second book, Singing at High Altitude, was published by Main Street Rag, and it deepened her vision concerning the interaction between the personal and the global. It came as no surprise to learn that Jennifer works as a psychotherapist with a special interest in the therapeutic uses of writing––because, to me, her poetry always seems in the process of inventing new spaces for the self to inhabit. Like a balance scale, leaden grief weighs heavily in the left pan, sometimes threatening to overwhelm the present moment. But the poet adds one more nearly-weightless page to the right and––for a moment, an hour, a great stretch of hours––a kind of balance returns. We readers can sometimes borrow a poem like this to help offset our own emotional balancing act. It was Edna St. Vincent Millay who challenged “Spring” to account for itself: “To what purpose, April, do you return again?/ Beauty is not enough.” Perhaps. But if we are willing to cherish our grief as well as our joy, both confirm how deeply we love this life. There is a momentum created by our hunger for beauty; it may just convey us to the place we’ve been needing to go.

 

 

 

 

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 BlueSky

@stevenratiner.bsky.social

and on Twitter          

@StevenRatiner

 

And coming soon:

a new website to house all the Red Letter archives at StevenRatiner.com

Good Grief: Poet Steven Ratiner dances with 'Grief' in his new collection of poetry

Interview conducted by Doug Holder

I am a member of the Board of Director's of the New England Poetry Club--so I was pleased to find out that our  president Steve Ratiner has a new collection of poetry out titled "Grief's Apostrophe."  (Beltway Editions 2025).  I caught up with a very busy Ratiner, and he graciously agreed to answer my questions about his new book, etc...

The noted poet Martha Collins writes of Ratiner's collection:

"In this heartbreakingly beautiful book, Steven Ratiner constructs a seamless fabric of grief, weaving threads of memory, keen observation of the natural world, variations on religious tradition, and an active awareness of language. Among the book's smaller pleasures are complex metaphors, varied syntax, and constant attention to the word: the poet is "marred by, married to this compulsive/ language and cannot shut it(shout it) out even in this house of silence." Which is fortunate for us who follow him as he moves from the personal before of witnessing illness and dementia, through a spiritually -deepened and globally-expanded exploration of death itself, to an after that finds solace in "love's continuance, grief's temporary reprieve," as well as the more permanent gift of art. Steven Ratiner has been championing other poets for many years. This gorgeous collection of his own fine work is long overdue."

Why write about grief?  Don't we have enough of that these days? Is there a sort of ugly/beauty about it?

Well, I agree that grief is one of the dominant emotional notes of our time. Personal grief, societal grief. There is a pervasive fear is about the well-being of the planet, the endurance of our democracy, the vitality and diversity of our culture. But that, to my mind, is not a reason to avoid writing about it; perhaps that’s a justification for focusing on that subject, because grieving is one of the central experiences of being human. One of the defining characteristics of being human: from infancy, we want, and then we have; and soon we learn to love what we have, even as the knowledge grows within us that eventually we have to let go of what all that fills our days. That sense of loss needs to be documented, shared, and perhaps even celebrated -- and I think poetry is one of the important experiences where that can take place. I might disagree with you, though -- I wouldn’t call it “an ugly beauty;” I think of it as possessing the dignity of the human experience. I think I tend to subscribe to what the poet Rilke said in describing Rodan’s sculpture, some of which were called ‘ugly’ at the time. I’m paraphrasing, but the poet wrote that ‘something that is true is beautiful, no matter how ugly it might appear to the eye; and something that is false is ugly, no matter how beautiful it might appear to the eye.’ So my hope for the poems in my new collection is that they possess some truth about them, and I trust that will create an experience that is, at the very least, illuminating -- and perhaps, at times, they are even beautiful.

I have always written about food. I find it profound and evocative. And indeed, in your book food ain't chopped liver. I was reading a striking few lines in a poem where you bring a pastrami sandwich to the high holy. Can you talk a bit about this?

Yes, indeed the poem you’re talking about is called “Clockwork;” it’s the opening poem in the first section of the book -- and it’s one of my favorites. It’s largely written about my father, who died when I was very young, at age 8 – though other vignette you mention occurred with my stepfather Jack. The majority of the poems in the collection have autobiographical elements about them – but they are also woven through with the experiences of family members and friends. I think I’ve created a broader sense of we by doing this, and the speaker’s experience becomes more encompassing. Because I was a child, looking back I regret that I was unable to offer much help to him as he faced the most challenging moment of his life: slowly the letting go of the world. Like most children, I was largely oblivious to what was taking place. So here, in this poem, I get to create an imagined world where, as an adult, I am rushing back home to be with my father. Through a series of small vignettes, you follow the speaker heading home -- and all of time seems to play into that journey. In the section that you’ve mentioned, the hospice nurse comes to visit him and asks him what he desires. This experience was one I actually witnessed with my stepfather, Jack. And he jokingly replied: I’d like a hot

pastrami sandwich on rye. But the next day, the nurse appeared with a hot pastrami sandwich. Since he had stomach cancer, he could not eat anything whatsoever -- he was only getting nutrition intravenously. But she said no, it’s not to eat: smell it, chew a bite, and then spit it out in my hand. He did just that – and you could see the tremendous pleasure it gave him. Witnessing this as a young man, I thought it was one of the most generous human acts I’ve ever seen. So, indeed, food has an important place in that poem, as well as others. If you’ll remember, there’s another poem about my mother visiting me, and I describe making corn muffins and coffee, so we could spend the afternoon talking. Food, eating and drinking together -- these simple pleasures of life -- these often end up being some of the most memorable times. It’s not only those grand moments that earn a place in poetry.

In your poem "Ballroom Dancing with the Bestial Dark." the metaphor of dancing with death, and as you put it "I am not death's wallflower." is very striking. The dance isn't a foxtrot, is it? It seems something so visceral, I mean this is not going gently into the night...here you rage, rage, rage!

You’re right to be thinking of that poem by Dylan Thomas – “do not go gentle into that good night.”. “Ballroom Dancing…” is a poem at the end of the first section of my book. This collection is divided into three sections, something like 3 musical movements. The first one centers largely on personal loss; the second one broadens out into familial, communal, societal grief; and the third one explores an attempt to metabolize our grief, to repair our wounds, to transform our emotions into some new experience which can allow us to continue growing. And often these attempts at healing involve writing and art-making, or at least the appreciation of the arts. “Ballroom Dancing...” is the very last poem in section 1, and it’s an attempt at using metaphor to alter my understanding about death and loss. I imagine it here as a dance, an intimate interaction. I am no longer looking at death as a monster, as the young boy certainly did; I am older now and no longer being that “wallflower,” observing from a safe distance. I’m finally willing to embrace its actuality, to participate in the way it is a continual presence as we age, to understand it on new term – perhaps to even find that beauty which we spoke of earlier. We are mortal; we have to surrender to small and great sacrifices – and still we seek to value our living experience, to perhaps cherish it all the more by knowing it to be fleeting.

Your Jewish background is very evident in the collection. Would you ever call yourself a Jewish poet?

No, I don’t think I would call myself a ‘Jewish poet’ only because, to my mind, I didn’t have a really good religious education when I was young. I think of myself as a secular Jew, and certainly embrace my history and traditions. But I suffered a break with my religion, with my childlike conception of God, an abruption triggered by my dad‘s death. It forced me to challenge so much of what I was being taught, the underlying belief system. But clearly the culture and history have stayed with me and do inform some of what appears in my poetry, especially throughout this collection. I think in these poems you see a man wrestling with his early world-view, testing what still feels valuable and what must be jettisoned or transformed. These are questions we all ask from time to time: What do we know? What do we believe? When life really challenges us, where do we find steady ground beneath our feet? And most importantly, how can this understanding help me to accomplish what feels most important to me in my life. I want to savor, to value so many experiences that my father was denied, dying as so young a man.

Now that you are the President of the New England Poetry Club—how do you find time to write?

I had something of a warning from a previous New England Poetry Club president: she felt a bit overwhelmed by the responsibilities and found that she did not write very much for the two years she assumed that leadership position. In fact, it made me hesitant at first to accept this position for that reason -- because writing is integral to my day-to-day experience. I write many times each week – and, in fact, if I go more than a day or two without writing, I feel very antsy, to say the least. So I made a promise to myself that I was not going to surrender all of that writing time – and, as it turns out, it’s not yet dampened my writing spirit. In some ways, maybe it’s even amplified it – because I so appreciate whenever I have an hour to just read, revise, and perhaps write. There’s a good deal of time where I’m attempting to do things to help the club and our members – but also poets more broadly, and the place poetry has in our communal life. I think it’s important to remind people that especially now, in these really challenging times that we’re facing, we’ve always found in poetry in art a place of refuge, a place to be fortified against difficulty, to develop new vision that might enlarge how we see the world, and as an occasion to simply not feel alone. So I do think this is an essential mission, for NEPC and the arts in general. But still it is my responsibility to carve out times in in each day for my own work. I tend to launch into writing first thing in the morning, and often very late at night. But I’ve developed a discipline for the last 60-some odd years: when the first spark of the poem hits, that first phrase or image announcing itself in my mind -- no matter what I’m doing or where I am, I take out my pocket notebook, and I’m going to follow where that poem leads. Many times, it won’t turn out to be a strong poem – but you never know. So when it calls, I respond – no excuses. So I’m aiming at a balance, though I would not say I’ve achieved that as of yet. There are many weeks when I still feel overwhelmed: between the Red Letter project, which you know about -- my poetry blasts that go out to a few thousand readers, featuring a new poets from all across the country, coupled with a brief commentary; and now my work to promote my new book and a brand new website; and of course the diverse projects working with the New England Poetry Club. It’s typically a packed week -- and I hope that, as time goes on, maybe I’ll feel I’ve achieved a little better balance.

Why should we read your book?

It’s hard for a poet to make that claim because, clearly, in its first manifestation, the poems of this book are an essential experience for the man with the pen in hand. But one of the reasons poets do what we do is because we feel our work may offer pleasure, perhaps insight, even to strangers. I do believe this this book has value for others because I have felt the enthusiastic reaction from audiences at readings. I feel that, in many ways, I’m voicing experiences, concerns, visions that many of us likely

share. I’m speaking out loud things that, sometimes in our society, are allowed to go unspoken. There is almost a taboo about sharing our grief, but also our great joy – as if this is reserved only for a few intimate relationships. I don’t think that makes for a particularly healthy world. My poems may be carving out a clearing in the busy work week, within the crowded thoughts of these tumultuous days -- a clearing where we can stop and feel, even for a few moments, what is most essential in our personal, our family, our community lives. This is most certainly a book that accomplished that for me personally -- but I have a hope that, for readers, for my community, others will find pleasure, surprise, and even solace in these poems. At least that that’s my deepest hope.