“Staying In” – Miriam Levine’s poem seems a somewhat prescient take on self-isolation. Granted, it’s only a rainstorm that drives the speaker indoors, not an invisible contagion that swept across the planet. And she is describing a day’s quarantine, not the interminable condition through which we’ve all been suffering. And yet, metaphorically, the piece suggests there will always be external forces that upend our expectations, drive us inward. When our view of the horizon is blotted out, how will we navigate a new reality? It is in what we choose to focus our attention, and how we arrive at some form of acceptance, that the tenor of our lives is revealed.
Not just this poem, but in much of Miriam’s work her end-point contains a quiet feeling of celebration – even when describing dark days and deep sadness. Hers is a matter-of-fact beauty that I find immensely appealing. Throughout her five poetry collections – of which Saving Daylight is the newest – Miriam operates by the dictum of another woman poet who wrote “Tell all the truth but tell it to slant”, helping us too to feel our way through uncertain circumstances. Though now she divides her time between New Hampshire and Florida, Arlington had previously been her home – and where she served as the town’s first Poet Laureate. The storm will eventually pass – this poem reminds us. And how will we choose to celebrate?
Staying In
I kiss the rain for washing away choices.
Why rush out to listen to another writer
when I can watch the horizon disappear?
Sun, rain, day, night –
any way –
the line between ocean and sky doesn’t exist.
A white-out storm brings down birds and blows supple
palms seaward.
I’ll bend too.
There’s enough wind to rip flags and knock
the yoke from my shoulders.
I’ve done enough chores to last a lifetime.
My scrubbed blouse hangs dripping from the rack,
my soaked socks slung over the rail.
An enormous palm frond floats in the flooded gutter.
I have no job except to praise.
– Miriam Levine (from The Dark Opens, Autumn House Press)
* And a renewed call to poets from Arlington and our neighboring communities: if you have poems you think would be right for a Red Letter installment, I hope you’ll give me a chance to consider them. Pass the word!
In ancient Rome, feast days were indicated on the calendar by red letters. To my mind, all poetry and art – and, in truth, even the Corona crisis itself – serves as a reminder that every day we wake together beneath the sun is a red-letter day.
– Steven Ratiner - steven.arlingtonlaureate@gmail.com
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-opportunity-to-win-tickets-108471605492
Reading Polly Brown’s poems, I find a more permeable membrane between human nature and the natural world than is common in contemporary writing. Goat, goose, barn swallow; apple, catalpa, spruce – they each share the spotlight in her poems like much-loved family members and are just as astutely observed. And grandparent, parent, child, grandchild seem to be elemental parts of the landscape, entwined with all that green urgency – and subject to sun, rain, and all the varieties of mortal weather. But the effect of Polly’s approach is often a remarkable sense of at-homeness in the world, a feeling many of us will realize we’ve forgotten somewhere along the way into adulthood. And thus the poem’s comfort even as they challenge.
After two lovely chapbooks, she’s recently published a full-length collection – Pebble Leaf Feather Knife – from which this poem is taken. Polly has received awards from the Massachusetts Artists Foundation and the Worcester County Poetry Association and has been a member of the Every Other Thursday poetry group for more than three decades. A lifelong writer and educator – each skill nurturing the other – Polly is in the process of moving back to her mother’s farmhouse in New Sharon, Maine, a place where many generations of her family had rooted their lives.
Dvorak and My Grandfather
My grandfather was six years old
when Dvorak discovered America,
but I can’t be sure
this music ever reached him.
Instead, he had the cows, wide and slow,
carrying their cargo of darkness
under a blue Maine sky;
ferns and white pines, the river;
the bride who didn’t abandon him
when all the wealth of his barns burned down
a week before their wedding. Listen:
here’s the quick-fingered mischief
of their sons. Maybe the cello is what we take
from love into the city, to help us
breathe there. Or maybe the sorrows
that made him weep and look away every goodbye,
could have been soothed by the sound
in the night, later, of a cello.
-- Polly Brown
(from Pebble Leaf Feather Knife
Cherry Grove Collections)
Unlike the previous Red Letter poets I’ve featured here, you’ll find no publication credits or literary awards in my introduction of Camille Maxwell – but that’s not terribly surprising considering she’s only recently completed the tenth grade at Arlington High School. But I will not be at all surprised if we check back in a few years and find all that changed. Here is a young woman who developed a deep love of language at an early age and for whom the allure of its music, its conjuring power is irresistible. I’m sure that playing violin (“and a little guitar”, she is quick to add) has reinforced in her the feeling that large moments can suddenly appear, right there at your fingertips – if one is attentive enough to seize them. She hopes to one day become a cardiac physician so I can imagine her – like William Carlos Williams – quickly jotting down a few lines of poetry between patients. In “Sunshine”, something as small as the aroma of a cup of tea (“I’m very picky about good quality tea!”), and the invitation of an open window, are enough to transport her mind…well, let’s just say beyond.
Though Camille is the first student writer to appear in the Red Letters, I certainly hope this will serve as an invitation for other young poets to consider taking that bold step and offering work to the community-at-large. We certainly need to hear from you.
Sunshine
The small noises of a guitar
And the drums that pepper and brush my eardrums
The scent of lemon and ginger, heating and swirling honey,
The cold of an open window, yellow leaves shimmering
Gold and green, values increased by opulent rays of light
What looks warm sways in biting air, crisp and clear
I feel far away from where I am, from where I sit
My eyes stretch my soul and mind
I’m pulled into fractals and waves
Bouncing off surfaces, revealing color in visions
I am seraphim in the sunlight and wind
-- Camille Maxwell
Community. It’s a popular buzzword these days, extending even into those ethereal online neighborhoods where only pixels congregate. One curmudgeonly friend scoffs: “If they can’t stop by when you’re sick to bring soup, they’re not part of your community.” Soup notwithstanding, Bonnie Bishop’s poems are invigorated by new dimensions of the communal experience; over the last decade, she and her husband spent part of each year in New Orleans, exploring dimensions of the city that reach far beyond the tourist haunts. Her poems embrace – and are imbued with – the spirit of this place and its people. I was lucky to get a sneak-peek at her forthcoming chapbook River Jazz (Every Other Thursday Press) which is brimming with moments of how, again and again, she felt welcomed into neighborhoods and situations as diverse as the city itself: breakfast cafes, river wharfs, churches, parks, bayou waters – and, of course, the countless jazz clubs throughout the French Quarter where the very lifeblood of a city is transformed into sound.
A poet, educator, and community organizer, she’s taught poetry and English for over three decades, from the elementary level up through college. Her first book, Local Habitation, came out in 2009, also through Every Other Thursday Press; and Finishing Line Press published her chapbook, O Crocodile in 2013. Bonnie’s writing reminds us that the strength of community – like that of history itself – is only preserved when no one is excluded.
Congo Square,
for the Choctaw and Chitimacha, was sacred—
high, dry ground on the portage trail between
Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi, a space
for harvest festivals and later, trading with the French.
Under code noir in Catholic Louisiana, all slaves
were baptized, and after church, had Sundays off,
so Africans, free and owned, gathered there once a week
to barter the baskets, bread, cloth, and tools they made.
***
Outside the Quarter, beyond the ramparts,
in the place now known as ‘back o‘ town,’
the people conjured rhythms out of Haiti, Cuba,
Africa, remade the instruments they remembered:
kalimba, log and barrel drums, gourd rattle,
mule jawbone, tambourine, and panpipes
made from willow branch or sugar cane.
There they danced the juba, calinda and bamboula
in circles, couples, double lines, clapping hands,
slapping feet, twisting torsos, chanting, swaying.
There too, a whipping post and pillory
slave market, executions
and, as the city grew,
circuses, cock fights, horse and carriage shows,
bullfights, foot races, kite flying, fireworks,
and the ascension of hot air balloons.
***
Now the park is peopled with tributes in bronze:
Louis Armstrong, horn in hand, a second line,
Buddy Bolden, blowing loud, a Mardi Gras Indian
in full regalia, and the bulldog head of Sidney Bechet.
On a big cobblestone plaza beneath a ring of towering
live oak trees, a visitor, reading historical plaques,
may learn the circle of trunks and limbs are all one tree
connected by a web of roots, hidden, nourishing, entwined.
– Bonnie Bishop (from River Jazz)
John Pijewski’s poems are terrible. And shockingly honest. And, I should quickly add, often devastatingly beautiful. They are colored by a sad truth of our world: pain begets pain. During the Second World War, John’s father was forced into a Nazi labor camp whose brutal conditions damaged him irreparably. Years later, safe, and making a new life in the United States, the father visited that same brutality upon his family. In John’s first book, Dinner With Uncle Jozef (Wesleyan University Press) – and now in Collected Father, a new manuscript he’s spent decades compiling – he has delved into that dangerous territory: how the nightmare of one generation shadows the ones that follow. More importantly, the writing explores a central question that’s much with us today: with what thoughts and actions can we attempt to break that sorrowful chain.
Fortunately, the darker poems are punctuated by unexpected moments of light, the simple beauties we too often overlook. In “Birds Before Dawn”, by saluting their tireless avian labor, John is able to recognize one of the few qualities he admired in his father: his unshakable work ethic. A similar perseverance marks Collected Father, an unscrolling of heart-wrenching song – but song nonetheless. In the challenging times we face today, perhaps such imaginative work is required of all of us.
Birds Before Dawn
So determined to sing their loud, cacophonous
songs before dawn. They’re just like my father.
No hesitation at rising so early to do their job.
Such a heavy weight they’ve placed on their thin
shoulders. They must sing loudly enough to wake
the sun, then sweet talk it into rising above
the horizon, at first shining weakly – perhaps it’s
a bit hungover – and then shining more brightly
when it’s had some coffee and is truly awake.
Once the sun’s in the sky they can relax, take time
to find food before they begin to worry again.
If they don’t sing, the sun will not rise tomorrow.
Such work ethic – so industrious, so dedicated
to their job. No days off. No sick days taken.
– John Pijewski
The Red Letter Poems Project was going to be a novel way of sharing Arlington’s poetic voices, sent off in bright red envelopes, a one-off mass mailing intended to surprise and delight. In partnership with seven organizations: The Arlington Commission for Arts and Culture, The Arlington Center for the Arts, The Arlington Public Library, The Arlington International Film Festival, Arlington Community Education, The Council on Aging, and YourArlington.com –
The world speaks to me when I have one month of chemo left
Should I take the trail that loops through Spy Woods?
A woman with short grey hair, wearing a plaid yellow skirt and tennis shoes,
comes down it. Her head nods towards me, then turns away, shy as a heron’s.
Four children are piling up the red maple leaves, throw them in the air.
“Wheeeee!” says the black-haired girl, “ there are so many leaves.”
I can’t believe I actually heard someone say Wheeeee..
Two teenagers in grey sweatshirts cheer the last runner in a road race.
He holds his stomach, each breath pierces through him. I hear them say:
“You can do it, Joe, just one more corner. Good job, Joe, come on. “
Susan Lloyd McGarry
Elegy. Acknowledgment of grief. Awareness of the void we feel in even the most beautiful of summer days. Well over six hundred thousand families around the world — 150,000 in our country alone — will forever hear that word, Corona, and feel every nerve in the body plucked like a bass string, reverberating deep. But elegy is one face of a two-sided coin, and the obverse is celebration — knowledge of how a certain face, a familiar voice made our day brim with abiding joy. We each carry our share of unvoiced elegies, for losses great and small; and we must also find in our awareness the possible celebration every new day presents, simply to maintain our humanity. Often a poet’s work assists us in both.
I think of Jo Pitkin as an Arlingtonian — even though, after fifteen years, she traded the waters of Spy Pond for the majestic Hudson River in upstate New York. What I remember best were her tireless labors on the yearly Heart of the Arts Festival, back when the Arlington Center for the Arts was young, helping our town to enjoy the work of painters, dancers, musicians, craftspeople and, yes, poets. Jo’s poems have a painter's eye and a musician’s sense of rhythmic invention. She is the author of four full-length poetry collections including Commonplace Invasions where today’s poem first appeared. “Luna Moths” is sort of a pre-elegy when the prospect of her father’s loss first entered her consciousness. But in my reading, it’s a tribute to our sense of relationship — to the people we most care about and the places that summon our deepest attention. In pronouncing her quiet words, in imagining the brief beauty of the luna moth, we too might feel the complexity of our moment: its somber joy, its pained exultation.
Luna Moths
On the day I realize my father
might be ill, two luna moths appear
like lime-green handprints stuccoed
on the white walls of my office studio.
This husband and wife come to me
from the boughs of my black walnut tree.
While their spread wings cure, eight
eyespots fix on my clumsy, worried haste.
Because the moths only live to mate,
they do not have mouths. They do not eat.
Flying at night, the moonly moths live
for a week. This is all the span they have.
Now, fading by day like scraps of fabric,
the pair rests. Their feathery antennae tick
lightly in June gusts. At twilight, a sheer
single hand almost waves at me as it flutters
across the pale gold disk fobbed firmly,
like a pocket watch, to the deep blue sky.
— Jo Pitkin (from Commonplace Invasions, Salmon Poetry, 2014)
“Celebration?!” wrote a friend, incredulous after reading my intro to last week’s Red Letter. “Have you been paying attention — these days, what’s to celebrate?” I think he misunderstood me, perhaps imagining something on the order of fireworks, birthday sparklers. But a poet like Con Squires provides the ideal response, again and again throughout his poetry: memory, dogs, New Orleans jazz, a friend’s voice, Atlantic waters lapping below his home, second chances — and, oh yes, the sight of a child, any child, for whom nearly every minute of each ordinary day is charged with awe, surprise, fear, relief, unanticipated pleasure. Deep attention — a poet’s stock in trade — equals, in my mind, celebration.
Case in point: following a divorce, and at a time when his life felt in disarray, Con met his future wife — the partner with whom he still shares his days. Later, being introduced to her brother and sister-in-law, he remembers the couple seated on their couch, each with one of their twin babies held in the crook of an arm, a symmetrical tableau, feeding them from bottles. Con goes home and puts pencil to paper: celebration. I find such simple beauties throughout this poet’s work, in collections like Dancing with the Switchman and Ifka’s Castle, not to mention his novel about ancient China, The First Emperor. Years pass; the babies grow; the poem remains evergreen. The biographical note he sent me ended with this sentence: “Con Squires is 84 and getting younger by the minute.” Quod erat demonstrandum.
First Chairs
— for Kirk and Julie Bishop
I thought, they seem like violins,
Guarnerii, perhaps,
warm to the touch, full-toned,
impossible not to play.
They must, like violins, be held
in just one certain way.
When stroked by the fiddlers’ bows
they curl uncurl their toes
and sing with a milky sound.
— Con Squires
from: Ifka’s Castle (Every Other Thursday Press)
Can you imagine the relief? In the early development of the human species — when a winter meant unbearable cold, scarcity of food, and a suffering that might well be interminable — a new knowledge eventually solidified: circular time. Communicated to the tribe through shamanic songs shared around a fire, or ceremonial paintings on the walls of caves, this understanding offered the promise that spring will indeed follow winter, that the animals will return, the plants grow, and life endure. Gary Snyder wrote: “Poets, as few others, must live close to the world that primitive men are in: the world, in its nakedness, which is fundamental for all of us -- birth, love, death: the sheer fact of being alive.“
Deborah Melone, in her lovely chapbook The Wheel of the Year (Every Other Thursday Press), carries on that tradition by creating an 8-poem sequence to follow the solar cycle of a year. Based on the pre-Christian agricultural rites, her poems have a somewhat formal structure and diction; her half-rhymes and rhythmic cadences become almost incantatory — and we join her in celebrating the wheel of existence that carries us all. The poems bear the ‘pagan’ names for the summer and winter solstice; the fall and spring equinox; and the “cross-quarter days” which further divide the year. Deborah is also the author of Farmers’ Market, and her work has appeared in numerous literary magazines. For several years she chaired the Advisory Committee of The School Street Sessions, a venerable reading series focused on the history and literature of New England. Memory, tradition, the communal impulse: they guide much of this poet’s work and, hopefully, will invigorate ours.
Lammas [August 1]
I.
Make the last hay,
let loose a sheep.
Whoever can catch it
can have it to keep.
Scythe the first wheat,
bake the first loaf.
Bless the new bread,
break a piece in half.
Break the halves again.
Put a piece in each corner
of the great storage barn.
You worked hard to garner
this early harvest.
Guard what you have reaped.
The blessings of the crop
will be safely kept.
II.
Now celebrate the bounty,
the grape and the vine.
Delight in the plenty.
Toast with new wine.
Decorate your altar
with scythes and sickles,
cornflowers, poppies,
honey, herbs, apples.
Fire up the brazier.
Make a corn doll
in your own image.
They symbolize us all.
Throw them in the fire.
We must sacrifice each year
that we may thrive later on.
Let the dolls burn.
–– Deborah Melone
Some thirty years ago, when I created a poetry interview series for The Christian Science Monitor, Martín Espada was one of the first poets I invited to participate. He’d only just published his second full-length collection but I was excited by his long Whitmanesque cadences, his dynamic use of metaphor, and one more thing that made his writing stand out from the crowd: ambition. But I’m not simply referring to a determined drive to succeed — that’s almost a commonplace among young writers. It was clear that Martín aspired to create a poetic voice that did more than represent his personal consciousness. Even then, he envisioned his words speaking for his people. At the outset, his people might have referred to those of his Puerto Rican heritage; or that of diverse immigrant families struggling to make their way in the US; or, enlarging its scope, any individual who felt marginalized by society, anguished by prejudice; or simply those painfully aware that their stories and dreams were left out of the greater American narrative. Today, after more than 20 books as a poet, essayist, editor and translator, it’s clear that Martín’s conception of his people includes any agile mind on the other end of his sentences willing to engage with this fiery imagination.
It would exhaust my entire space to list all the honors showered upon this poet (the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the Shelley Memorial Award, the American Book Award, the 2018 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for a lifetime’s achievement, and more), but I will tell you the two I am most impressed with. The first is the palpable eruption of energy in an auditorium any time Martín performs (and his readings are indeed bardic performances); the experience of a poet’s language being so thoroughly embraced by strangers is a trophy of extraordinary value. One of his best-known poems is “Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100”; written after 9/11, it is dedicated to the 43 members of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union working at the Windows on the World restaurant, who lost their lives in the attack on the World Trade Center. They were a veritable United Nations of immigrants, some of whom were undocumented, invisible in life and more so in death. If you haven’t heard Martín deliver that poem, I’d suggest an immediate trip to YouTube. And that second great honor (one Martín himself prizes above all others): a framed letter on the poet’s wall from the membership of Local 100 who felt their lives, their voices, found safe harbor inside the poet’s verse. What praise could matter more? He’s offered us here a new poem that will appear in his forthcoming collection, Floaters (W. W. Norton & Co.), arriving in January — a love poem to his wife Lauren (also a fine poet and teacher) and a tribute to the revolutionary act that is kindness in these troubled times.
Aubade with Concussion
Poverty is black ice.
— Naomi Ayala
You leave me sleeping in the dark. You kiss me and I stir,
fingers in your hair, eyes open, unseeing. You leave me asleep
every morning, commuting to the school in the city at sunrise.
The landlord’s driveway, a muddy creek, ices over hard after
the freezing rain clatters all night. Your feet fly up, your head
slamming the ground, an eclipse of the sun flooding your eyes.
You sleep under the car. No one knows how long you sleep.
You awake with a hundred ice picks stabbing your eardrums.
You awake, coat and hair soaked, and somehow drive to school.
You remember to turn left at the Smith & Wesson factory.
The other teachers lead you by the elbow to Mercy Hospital,
where you pause when the nurse asks your name, where you claim
your pain level is a four, and they slide you into the white coffin
of an MRI machine. You hold your breath. They film your brain.
Concussion: the word we use for the boxer plunging face-first
to the canvas after the uppercut blindsided him, not the teacher
commuting to school at sunrise in a Subaru Crosstrek. Yet, you would
drive, ears hammering as they hammer in the purgatory of the MRI.
A week before, Isabela came to you in the classroom and said:
Miss, I cannot sleep. Three days, I cannot sleep. Her boyfriend called
at 2 am, and she did not pick up. At 3 am, a single shot to the head
put him to sleep, and he will sleep forever, his body hidden beneath
a car in a parking lot on Maple Street, the cops, the television cameras,
the neighbors all gathering at the yellow-tape carnival of his corpse.
You said to Isabela: Take this journal. Write it down. You don’t have
to show me. You don’t have to show anyone. On the cover of the journal
you bought at the drugstore was the word: Dream. Isabela sat there
in your classroom, at your desk, pencil waving in furious circles.
By lunchtime, as her friends slapped each other, Isabela slept,
head on the desk, face pressed against the pages of the journal.
This is why I watch you sleep at 3 am when the sleeping pills fail
to quell the strike meeting in my brain. This is why I say to you
when you kiss me in my sleep: Don’t go. Don’t go. You have to go.
— Martín Espada
#RedLetterPoems #ArlingtonPoetLaureate #SeeingBeyondCorona #aiffpoem #aiff2020
