Dear....

When is the last time you wrote a letter? 

I've written cards and notes on a dwindling scale, but an honest to goodness letter of more than one page? That question sadly stumps me (and I like to write!)

In an age when emails fall into the "long form" category of correspondence (as in more than 140 characters) letter writing languishes in the "old fashioned" category.  The mailbox has transformed into a receptacle for everything but letters. And the electronic mailbox has caught up to its more pedestrian relative with more junk mail than missives.
 

The value of letter writing reached a high water mark for me last night after watching People's Light and Theatre Company's latest production, "Dear Elizabeth" by Sarah Ruhl.  The show's dialogue is in the form of correspondence between two friends, poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert "Cal" Lowell. In her forward to an 800+ page book containing all of Bishop's and Lowell's correspondence,  Ruhl notes, "their letters are so hyper-articulate that one almost has the impression that no bits of life were lived without being written down." 

Instead of interpreting the poets' work, the play is a verbatim collection of their words to each other as well as a few of their poems interspersed.  It is a glorious, intimate celebration of the art of written expression.

I could not get past the notion that every word I heard from that stage was written by each of these poets.  Every single unexplained word. 

In an age where 'reality' TV's intention is to brutally smack us in the face, the poets' words are no less real but their intention is far better - they are lovingly, humorously, respectfully, constructively, and best of all, intentionally connecting as friends.  There are no 'gotcha' moments and yet each moment grabs us.

It is precious intimacy at arms length. 

After her partner of 16 years commits suicide, Elizabeth responds to Cal's letter of condolence by noting it is, "Like being handed a lantern."

That image sticks.  In the deliciously anticipatory moment when we open a letter, a light does come on.  It says, welcome, come on in.  And, in her time of tragedy,  Elizabeth describes it as is a pathway out of the darkness.

Letters postmarked Paris, 1976

I used to write to my brother Joe at college and he would reply including a couple of dollars in his letters.  It was such a sweet, older sibling thing to do. My mom was a reliable correspondent when I was away at college.  She and my grandmother would also write each other routinely when my grandparents lived in Atlantic City, NJ for extended summers when I was a child. 
 
"Dear Elizabeth" concludes with the two poets opening a cache overflowing with their letters  As they scoop up handfuls of them, they speak in joy-filled letter snippets.  It provides a tactile tenderness to a correspondence we sadly know will cease.

I've saved some letters.  When my friend Joyce studied for a semester in Paris in the mid-seventies, we corresponded on those tissue paper thin airmail posts that seemed so exotic.  And letters from my brother Vincent when he moved to Hawaii in the pre-computer, pre-cell phone age are also stashed away.

These verbal snapshots hold no profound revelations.  They do hold me, nonetheless, because they tell me, in cherished longhand, someone took the time to share their thoughts and their life with me.  They are dear in every way.
  

For information on the production of "Dear Elizabeth" http://peopleslight.org/production/dear-Elizabeth
 
North Haven by Elizabeth Bishop

written for Robert Lowell in Memoriam

I can make out the rigging of a schooner
a mile off; I can count
the new cones on the spruce. It is so still
the pale bay wears a milky skin; the sky
no clouds except for one long, carded horse¹s tail.

The islands haven't shifted since last summer,
even if I like to pretend they have--
drifting, in a dreamy sort of way,
a little north, a little south, or sidewise--
and that they¹re free within the blue frontiers of bay.

This month our favorite one is full of flowers:
buttercups, red clover, purple vetch,
hackweed still burning, daisies pied, eyebright,
the fragrant bedstraw's incandescent stars,
and more, returned, to paint the meadows with delight.

The goldfinches are back, or others like them,
and the white-throated sparrow's five-note song,
pleading and pleading, brings tears to the eyes.
Nature repeats herself, or almost does:
repeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise.

Years ago, you told me it was here
(in 1932?) you first "discovered girls"
and learned to sail, and learned to kiss.
You had "such fun," you said, that classic summer.
("Fun"--it always seemed to leave you at a loss...)

You left North Haven, anchored in its rock,
afloat in mystic blue...And now--you've left
for good. You can't derange, or rearrange,
your poems again. (But the sparrows can their song.)
The words won't change again. Sad friend, you cannot change.

 EPILOGUE   by Robert “Cal” Lowell

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter’s vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write   
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All’s misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name