A Community of Voices: The First Year of the Red Letter Project
Poet
Many years back, I conducted a two-year poetry interview series for the Christian Science Monitor newspaper and their television outlets. I was delighted to engage in conversation with a number of poets whose work I most prized – both emerging talents and monumental figures – and it became, without a doubt, the second greatest learning experience of my career. During the interview with the great Irish poet John Montague, I was mentioning something about my own life as a poet when John commented, almost as an aside: “You know, you shouldn't say you're a poet." I remember feeling a flash of insecurity: was he challenging my credentials? Criticizing my work? But he continued: “You should say 'I try to write poetry.' Poet is a title other people confer on you. And it's very sweet to overhear when people refer to you as the poet. They understand what that job entails: saying the things we all want to hear or feel but often fear we cannot put into words – a sweetening of the atmosphere."
In 2019 I was appointed to my first term as the Poet Laureate for Arlington, Massachusetts, and I very much appreciated being honored by the place I’ve made my home for the last thirty-five years. I set myself a rather ambitious agenda, revolving around three themes: education, collaboration, and delight. For decades, I’d worked as a Poet-in-Residence through the Massachusetts Cultural Council and I’d witnessed again and again the dramatic effect art-making can have on the classroom and the community. My desire was for Arlington schools to really take advantage of this resource. And throughout my writing life, I’ve engaged in cross-disciplinary partnerships, working with visual artists, musicians, dancers, and videographers, loving how the cross-pollination of artistic languages opens up new possibilities. I’ve begun pursuing new collaborations with area artists.
But that third goal, delight, was always foremost in my mind. Every poet I know speaks of some version of that feeling – the thrilling, confounding, utterly consuming pleasure a new poem can provide. But for the civilian, who might only remember poetry from those long-ago English classrooms, poems may have seemed to be some sort of intellectual litmus test that would, in the end, prove the majority of us wanting. For most individuals delight is, sadly, not the first word that springs to mind when some oracular voice intones: “Let us go then, you and I…”.
So I began devising interesting experiences where people might bump into poetry and poets with some of that surprise and essential pleasure intact. One was called the Red Letter Project, its name referring to the practice, in Roman times, of marking the feast days on their calendars with red initials. Using a small metaphorical leap, this is what I proposed: gathering poems from the marvelous literary community in our town; recruiting a group of a dozen volunteers who would hand-address 1,000 bright red envelopes to randomly selected households; then stuffing each with a little packet of poems. On an appointed day, poetry would arrive unannounced across Arlington. Who could possibly resist reading a poem that appeared under such intimate auspices? How could the strangeness of the experience not turn the ordinary into a red-letter day?
A friend, shaking his head at the effort and expense of the idea, asked me simply: Why? Simply: because Arlington was calling me their poet.
Who Could Have Imagined. . .?
Then Covid struck – and my vision of envelope-stuffing parties quickly evaporated. But once the first lockdown went into effect, it took me only a week of isolation – our attendant fears of this deadly virus magnified by the supposedly informational daily Presidential briefings – to realize how devastating an effect this was going to have on all our lives, even those who escaped the illness. So I hatched the idea of turning the Red Letters into an online project. Using my own mailing list as a starting point, I solicited partners from arts and community organizations across town who committed to emailing or re-posting a weekly poetry installment on their websites, thus opening a potential readership in the tens of thousands. I designed a simple format, and invited Fred Marchant – an esteemed poet who I thought of as the dean of our literary community – to select one of his poems to be RLP #1. His piece, “Pinckney Street”, is a simple evocation of the way “for three weeks each year/and beginning tomorrow/this will be the most/beautiful place in the city.” It’s a poem that invites readers to recognize and savor the beauty that is close at hand – things that ought not to be overlooked, even in a threatening time. And that first Friday at noon, Red Letters appeared in inboxes all across town.
I was gratified that each of the poets I invited enthusiastically agreed to participate. We were all feeling so helpless at the time, almost desperate to contribute to the community’s well-being in any way – and poets were no exception, even if what we could offer was only a three-minute oasis of calm and thoughtful reflection once a week. It’s shocking to think that we may already be forgetting how dark those early days of the pandemic really were. I remember my wife and I taking walks around our neighborhood, making a point of greeting each masked individual we passed with a nod, a wave, a few friendly words. Some stopped to chat, to offer their take on this utterly strange situation we found ourselves in. But others sped by with their eyes resolutely on the pavement; some surprised me by swerving anxiously into the gutter to avoid even distanced contact. I recall thinking: this is how terror is generated – a second contagion.
The Red Letters kept coming, and I began to receive notes back from readers, thanking me for this project or offering comments about the day’s featured poem. I made a point of answering every email, believing that these brief conversations were an essential part of the project: a reminder that, even as we paced about in our own houses, our ties to family, friends, culture, and community would endure. Then I’d gather together some of the comments received and forward them with a note to each poet. I was so pleased to see how much they appreciated the comments, a reminder that – while we poets build these linguistic contraptions alone and primarily in response to our own unique compulsion – we have a secondary awareness that there might be other eyes in the world, other minds for whom these poems could prove useful. It soon required many hours each week to bring all this about, especially since it was essentially a one-person operation – but it felt more than worthwhile. And after all, how long could a crisis like this actually last – a month? Eight weeks, tops.
A Cascade of Crises
Then things changed again. George Floyd’s name became the latest addition to a roster of Black citizens who suffered an extrajudicial killing at the hands of the police. There were protests in the streets all across America. The increasingly aggressive rhetoric coming from the halls of government seemed to throw gasoline on an already-raging fire. It seemed a long-overdue racial reckoning was finally upon our nation. In a matter of months, the pandemic had not only cratered the American economy, it brought to light the vastly unequal way our country treats people according to their race and economic status. Amid the fervor of these national issues, I began to question what response might be needed on a local level. I was under no illusions that these weekly poems would make a drastic difference to readers – but doesn’t the possibility of even small change demand our best efforts?
Around this time, the Boston Globe ran a rather lavish profile on me and the Red Letter Project, and suddenly I began to receive submissions from poets in neighboring communities across the Commonwealth. Not only did I open submissions to all poets anywhere, I shifted the nature of the work being featured, expanding from poems that simply offered comfort to include work that challenged, inspired, helped enlarge the cultural conversation. Readers appreciated the vitality of these new poems – as well as the changed nature of my brief introductions to each installment. I began to view them as a journal entry in response to both the poem at hand and the events of the week touching on all our lives.
I became aware that readers were actually counting on the Red Letters in their weekly routine when, after a few months, I woke up one Saturday morning believing it was only Friday. (Can you remember when, early on, the days and weeks seemed to bleed together like watercolors?) Opening my inbox, I found a number of notes from querulous readers: ‘what happened to our Red Letter Day?!’ And all the while, the subscribers’ list grew and the hits the RLPs received on my partners’ sites increased. Since each installment invited readers to share the poems and re-post them on social media, the emails began arriving from readers in states all up and down the Eastern Seaboard, as well as from Illinois, Michigan, Arizona, California, Hawaii – and even a solitary Red Letter reader in Turkey, and another in South Korea. This was another sort of reminder: hope, too, is contagious.
“A Community of Voices”
Back when I was in college (a period somewhere between those fabled Roman times and what we blithely term ‘the modern age’), the so-called New Criticism was still in vogue – a critical theory which attempted to examine a literary text in isolation from the author’s prior works or personal history. Even then, this seemed to me a somewhat misguided notion. Later, Deconstructionism amplified this impulse – further severing the poet from his/her/their poem, placing the responsibility for aesthetic engagement and meaning-making squarely in the mind of the reader (or, more accurately, the critic, whose stature seemed the greatest beneficiary of this concept.)
To me, this seemed to strip something foundational from the writing/reading experience, and to inflict an unnecessary isolation on poets already constrained by the solitary nature of their craft. I remember an essay by Eavan Boland entitled “Warning, Witness, Presence” that fleshed out this old dilemma: “Where does the poet belong; where should the poem be rooted? Within or without? In public or private worlds?” She seemed to take aim at the last few generations of inward-turning poets “crafting a language to reflect a reality rather than seeking a reality to inform a language.” It should be mentioned that Boland comes out of a bardic tradition that has not lost the memory of what it's like to have the very ground beneath you repossessed, to have one's poetry (and even one's language) suppressed by a conquering army. Honoring her predecessors, she wrote, "It was not just that their words were written in the shadow of the gallows, or the darkness of history. It was also that they had touched the heart of their people. Their poems were remembered, recited, kept alive in an oral tradition. Despite the tragedy of their decline, they proved that poetry could keep company with the ordeals of a people.” It seemed to me that our mounting crises were demanding no less from writers today: to keep company with the ordeals being suffered by every community on the planet, not just the one we called home.
Even a poet like Mary Oliver, who led something of a reclusive life, spoke to me in our old interview of an almost sacred bond that develops between writer and reader – and the pain that results from the degradation of that relationship. “Art now has to have more patience because art used to be used so much in our tribal, our community rituals. This is no longer so. The poet is a superfluous person in terms of society now. So you don't go to the church, you don't go to the ceremonies, you don't go to the songfest for your poems. You read them quietly to yourself in a private way, out of books usually, or you hear a poet speak them. But there may come a time when the poem [is found] that is the little handle that opens the great door – and everything in one's life, thereafter, is different...”. Seamus Heaney, in our conversation, spoke of poetry as a shared “jubilation – [and] if not jubilation, adequacy to the difficult things. . .something fortifying.” I was realizing that the Red Letters could become just such an offering – that very ‘Community of Voices’ I used (with a certain hopefulness) as the subject line for every mailing.
Every Day We Wake Together. . .
On the fifty-second week of the Red Letters, I wrote a slightly longer introduction to the installment, reflecting on what all these poets had been generous enough to share over the past year, and how our current situation was evolving. We’d had poems of surprise and celebration from writers like Chen Chen, Susan Donnelly, and Miriam Levine; and pieces that explored our ‘Covid reality’ from Teresa Cader and Ellen Steinbaum; and poems that tackled the social, political, and racial divide from Rita Dove and Enzo Silon Surin, Martín Espada and Afaa Michael Weaver. When Martha Collins and Christopher Jane Corkery let me share poems about their deep personal losses, readers responded with stories of their own grieving. This was not at all an atomized readership estranged from the writers who shaped the words – this was how we rely on language as a connective tissue, and on poets to help express (as Montague claimed) “the things we all want to hear or feel but often fear we cannot put into words.”
Today, several months into year-two of the Red Letters, I believe the project has accomplished that “sweetening of the atmosphere” we look for from the poets who matter to us. Having had few expectations at the outset for what might be possible with such an undertaking, I can report to you, without hesitation, that this has easily been the greatest learning experience of my life as a poet. Each Red Letter installment has this sentence appearing in the introductory material: “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.” Optimistic perhaps, in light of all our country has suffered in recent years, but a sentiment that poets have been expressing for five millennia. This work has schooled me in the power of this idea. Each one of us, quarantined behind the tiny window of individual consciousness, desperately needs that suddenly unroofed moment, the breathtakingly expansive horizon that good poetry can provide. It’s the news that remains news that Pound told us about, and a counterbalance to even the darkest headlines.
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If you would like to receive the Red Letters in your inbox – or have poetry you would like to submit – you can reach me at: steven.arlingtonlaureate@gmail.com
All of the Red Letters are archived on RLP partner sites like the YourArlington news blog (https://www.yourarlington.com/easyblog/entry/28-poetry/2944-redletter-022621); Robbins Library (https://robbinslibrary.wordpress.com/); Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene (http://dougholder.blogspot.com); and Arts Arlington (http://artsarlington.org/red-letter-poems/).
"Warning, Witness, Presence" by Eavan Boland, appeared in Poets & Writers, vol. 28, issue 6.
Quoted passages from my interviews are from GIVING THEIR WORD: Conversations with Contemporary Poets (University of Massachusetts Press)
Steven Ratiner has published three poetry chapbooks, and is completing work on two full-length collections. His work has appeared in scores of journals in America and abroad including Parnassus, Agni, Hanging Loose, Poet Lore, Salamander, QRLS (Singapore), HaMusach (Israel), and Poetry Australia. He's also written poetry criticism for The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, and The San Francisco Chronicle. Giving Their Word – Conversations with Contemporary Poets was re-issued in a paperback edition (University of Massachusetts Press) and features interviews with many of contemporary poetry’s most important figures. In 2019, he was appointed as the Poet Laureate for Arlington, Massachusetts.