It’s Black Friday here at the Deconstruction, barely 6 a.m., and no surprise, I can’t sleep. No, I didn’t drop the Thanksgiving turkey or burn the sweet potatoes or forget to put the carcass in the fridge after the late-night sandwiches. No, I didn’t drink too much or make any embarrassing holiday toasts. And no, I’m not lamenting the return to business as usual after I drop my parents off at the Charlotte airport later today. In fact, while I’m not looking forward to writing any more web copy for a product that shall here remain nameless, I kind of need the money. Indeed, how else will I finance the new doorbuster?

No, best as I can figure it, I’m up because a new Fable hit the street the day before yesterday while I was showing my parents the new bathroom, which they paid for last year but hadn’t seen until this week. They were thrilled by the vanity and delighted with the tile work, so you know, but none of that does my readers any good when they sit down on the pot.

Anyway, you can read the November installment over at Free Times. While you’re there, you can also leave a comment for the editors, email the column to your mother-in-law, print a copy to stick on your fridge or click around looking for evidence of my floundering career as a freelancer. Indeed, do whatever you like over there—just don’t try to come back using the link at the bottom, which points to a site called reconstructionfables not deconstructionfables and which, should you click it, will launch you unceremoniously into my subconscious.

What can I say? The webmaster hates me.

It is fitting, though—this typographical mistake. I won’t call it irony, but there is something, well, apropos about the mix-up. See, the new Fable is about both putting things up and taking things down, i.e. reconstructing and deconstructing, in this case the sort of Frostian fence at the back of my property. The new column is also about throwing garbage into the neighbor’s yard then pretending you don’t know where the property line ends, but that’s more than I should go into here, especially considering the restraining order. You’re better off just reading the column.

~

PS: Speaking of Thanksgiving, if you didn’t get enough to eat yesterday, or your holiday bird somehow didn’t turn out like you’d hoped it would and you want to avoid a repeat disaster come Christmas, check out the latest post from the crack research team over at Very Little Known Facts. Let me tell you, those guy can talk turkey.

Olores de amanecer selvático en el corazón de una ciudad que despierta. Ha sido el primer descubrimiento feliz. Para empezar, he retomado sin mucho esfuerzo los veinte kilómetros semanales. Área protegida desde 1995, dice a la entrada. Coatíes, pájaros y tortugas cruzan intempestivos el sendero que se abre sinuoso entre la vegetación. (Mmm… ¿puede una tortuga ser intempestiva?). Hay mucha gente desde temprano, el lugar se llena sin desbordarse, vienen a hacer ejercicio. Para quienes buscan socializar o exhibirse hay lugares en la ciudad menos humildes y pedestres. En cada cuadra hay un gimnasio. Cancún es un poco como Miami Beach pero sin Ocean Drive, sin una fauna local discernible, no sé a dónde se van a exhibir los cancunenses. Por lo pronto este es un buen lugar, da gusto estar aquí, sudar, oxigenar el cerebro.

Correr en las mañanas siempre me ha resultado benéfico en otros sentidos más allá de lo físico, y no sólo como ejercicio de la voluntad. El corazón empieza a bombear a mayor velocidad y el torrente sanguíneo fuerza su entrada en mis sulfatadas dendritas y las ideas se empiezan a mover, a aclararse ciertas imágenes. Algunas regresan a casa conmigo y se abren camino hasta la página en blanco. A veces la chispa está ahí desde antes y se inflama con la carrera. La que no anida no era mía, no tengo que preocuparme por lo que me abandona, sino ocuparme con lo que se queda. Eso hago. Ahora. He echado a andar, sin prisa, digo con Robert Frost: “I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep”

In the summer between my fourth and fifth year of university I did a four-month unpaid internship at the National Post. Without a penny to spare for recreation, I turned to the University of Toronto’s library for my reading material, and I decided to sample some of the giants of American Literature: I read Ernest Hemingway and Gore Vidal, and I devoured the complete works of Robert Frost.

Most people know a couple of Frost poems in passing. The Road Not Taken usually finds its way into your school curriculum at some point, and everyone knows the line, “Good fences make good neighbors” even if they’ve never read Mending Wall. I enjoyed them both, obviously, but those aren’t the poems that compelled me to copy them down into one of my notebooks and turn back to them in idle moments over the years. These are the ones that have stayed with me, and why:

Rose Pogonias
by Robert Frost

A saturated meadow,
Sun-shaped and jewel-small,
A circle scarcely wider
Than the trees around were tall;
Where winds were quite excluded,
And the air was stifling sweet
With the breath of many flowers, –
A temple of the heat.

We raised a simple prayer
Before we left the spot,
That in the general mowing
That place might be forgot;
Or if not all so favored,
Obtain such grace of hours,
that none should mow the grass there
While so confused with flowers.

A good poem speaks to everyone on an individual level, and Rose Pogonias takes me to a dozen secluded meadows I’m come across in Algonquin Provincial Park over the years. There’s something magical in finding a hidden place all your own, a spot that seems frozen in its prime. Time stands still there, and you can drink it in at your leisure, feeling the peace of it sink into your marrow. I was so taken with the picture his words painted that I was jarred at the thought of someone mowing my wildflowers down. My paradise is in the wild, but of course Frost was in New England’s pastures. He hopes the innocence of his flowers will be spared the scythe and live as they are forever, whereas mine need not fear the hand of man. I found myself feeling sympathy for his less-secure happiness, and the ridiculousness of that impulse made me smile.

The Cow in Apple Time
by Robert Frost

Something inspires the only cow of late
To make no more of a wall than an open gate,
And think no more of wall-builders than fools.
Her face is flecked with pomace and she drools
A cider syrup. Having tasted fruit,
She scorns a pasture withering to the root.
She runs from tree to tree where lie and sweeten.
The windfalls spiked with stubble and worm-eaten.
She leaves them bitten when she has to fly.
She bellows on a knoll against the sky.
Her udder shrivels and the milk goes dry.

The cow, to me, is a wonderful allegory of what hedonism can do. Who doesn’t feel fettered by the constraints of a society and its rules, sometimes? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to make hay while the sun shines, to set aside what I can have and take what I want? Yet looks what happens to the cow when she escapes the farm to live her dream of grazing free through the orchard? She gets a stomach ache, and –without a farmer to milk her– her udders hurt and then go dry. We all must pay the piper, especially when we pursue a desire that is denied us for good reason. This poem is about freedom and consequence, told through a barnyard animal. It’s beautiful.

A Minor Bird
by Robert Frost

I have wished a bird would fly away,
And not sing by my house all day;
Have clapped my hands at him from the door
When it seemed as if I could bear no more.
The fault must partly have been in me.
The bird was not to blame for his key.
And of course there must be something wrong
In wanting to silence any song.

There’s a tremendous self-awareness in this poem. Frost is unhappy, and knows not why. He projects his discontent onto an innocent bird, but in the course of shooing it away he realizes that the fault lies within himself. This is a realization that we should all seek when we find ourselves in a sour mood. The first step in dealing with a problem is recognizing it. The second step is moving forward from that realization without being distracted by excuses.

Plowmen
by Robert Frost

A plow, they say, to plow the snow.
They cannot mean to plant it, no–
Unless in bitterness to mock
At having cultivated rock.

Short, pithy, flippant and yet melancholy. New England’s winters are justly famous, and for a farmer they can be a source of resentment. Still, there is some amusement to be drawn from complaining if it’s done eloquently. Frost is nothing if not eloquent. He’s a philosopher on the human condition, but his sophistry is as plain spoken as the Yankee yeomen he considered himself to be. He once said, “In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life — It goes on.” That’s a sobering comfort to draw upon.

His epithet was drawn from one of his poems: “I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.” We should all be so lucky.

Photo by Alexis Rhone Fancher

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.”

- Robert Frost

Alexis Rhone Fancher

All Rights Reserved

© 2009

During change, I revisit things that are central to my identity, even if they’ve been parked in some back garage for awhile. One of my identity standbys is my favorite poem of all-time: “Birches” by Robert Frost. I’ve long connected with the raw and heartfelt emotion in its verses, which I never tire of rereading. Every time I read the poem, I gain some new insight or perception from its seemingly never-ending depths, no matter how much I’ve changed. I guess its words appeal to something fundamental inside of me, something that’s at the core of who I am, and when I can’t rely on others or myself, I can rely on this poem’s uncanny powers to direct me, to remind me of who I am and what I believe.

My favorite passage is:

With Thanksgiving approaching rapidly, my thoughts turn to the poetry of Robert Frost, whose poetry I grew up on and adore.

Today, we visit those snowy woods.

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost 1923

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day,
Nothing gold can stay.

*Robert Frost, 1923

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
*Robert Frost,1923

“…I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference”  R.Frost

This is how I am beginning this blog – I too have reached a point where I must choose my path.  That which slakes the thirst of my soul – all that is literature and art in all its beautiful forms – or that which has become drudgery of late – earning the bread and butter I need to be able to survive..without asking another for assistance.

I am beginning this blog in part to start the creative process going again – and in part to find all the digital versions of work I have been able to get published as a freelance journalist over the years.  In short, my purpose is also to create a digital portfolio that will, I hope, in the months to come, make the moment of flight between career paths a less arduous one.

I don’t know what lies ahead and it would be so much easier to cling to the comfort of being in a familiar job situation – but I begin to feel the restrictive noose around my neck that this job has begun to imply.  

I feel I am ready for a change!

I was intrigued to find that Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening” had been made into a lovely book, illustrated by Susan Jeffers.  The pictures glory in the mystery of the woods and then making friends with the place, as the old man in the sleigh plays in the snow and brings gifts of hay and seeds for the forest creatures.  I’m surprised that this book was originally illustrated in 1978…Surprised mostly that I’d never seen it before.  The new edition, published in 2001, includes a velum dust jacket and it is so pretty. 

This book would make great gift for an elementary school teacher or child between ages of 5 and 9.  What a nice way to introduce a famous poem, especially if given along with the suggestion it can be sung and music to sing along with…

I’d never heard anyone sing this poem, but the words about a deeply private and spiritual moment are just asking to be sung. 

I heard a beautiful recording of “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening” by the opera singer Susan Graham.  Although this setting and her voice are gorgeous, not many people would be comfortable singing this piece (even if the key were lowered), but I noticed shades of  the tune “Greensleeves.” 

Sure enough, this poem is the perfect accompaniment to that wonderful old tune.

Greensleeves is a great tune for singing a capella, and doing so allows you to take your time with the words and the especially beautiful illustrations in Susan Jeffers’ book.

A terrific sing along track can be found on “A Festival of Carols in Brass” by the Philadelphia Brass Ensemble.  The instrumental track with horns is for the song “What Child is This” (Track 21), the Christmas carol which was written to the tune of Greensleeves.  The key and tempo are quite nice for singing the song and turning the pages of the book.  As an added bonus, this instrumental track repeats the melody exactly as many times as the poem has verses.

So was I once myself a swinger of birches. And so I dream of going back to be…. One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

Photo taken by: Joanna Etshokin

Text by: Robert Frost (BIRCHES)

A poem by Robert Frost called “It Bids Pretty Fair”

The play seems out for an almost infinite run.

Don’t mind a little thing like the actors fighting.

The only thing I worry about is the sun.

We’ll be alright if nothing goes wrong with the lighting.

There is a lot of discussion at the moment about environmental collapse and disaster especially in regards to the Mayan calendar. This is no doubt due in part to the recent movie 2012, which depicts the destruction of the world by Solar energy and its interaction with the Earth’s interior. Frost wrote this poem in 1947, I wonder if he was thinking about such a disaster when he composed it. He wrote another poem; “Fire and Ice” that also expresses his thoughts that the world may end in Fire. In the bible also, this notion of fire is emphasised as the cause of the world’s end. In 2 Peter 3:7 we see the words; “… the present heavens and earth are reserved for fire…”

There are times when our beautiful web of human interaction makes the world seem so tiny and sacred; yesterday was one of those days.

I woke up to receive an email from Amers, one of my dearest, who is in her first year of Teach for America, in Hawaii. Amers had forwarded me “The Road Less Traveled,” by Frost, along with some hope that my day was good. I re-read the lines, which I had not tasted in at least a year or so, and they were more beautiful and soul-piercing than ever before.

I found “Oh, I marked the first for another day!/ Yet knowing how way leads on to way/ I doubted if I should ever come back” to be more full of simple truth than my young (comparatively) self could have ever known.

I taught and danced through the minutiae that has become my developed, daily routine, and in the late evening I went to Karate class. After I had showered and dressed, I made plans with two of the guys to grab a beer at the bar directly underneath the gym. Just before we entered, I got a phone call from another dearest, MB, who was having a quiet sick-day  at his station, in Antarctica.

I stood outside and talked to MB for 15 minutes, and felt like he wasn’t so far away as we giggled, cooed, and smiled in our voices. Then I went inside the bar, and over a 0.5 liter beer, my two friends and I discussed the regional differences of Romanian sarmale.

And life felt so close and simple and snug.
And I realized that, although I am learning to miss the amazing, our human web provides means of maintaining the most basic foundations of connection and friendship.
And although I know how way leads onto way, and I do doubt if I should ever come back to re-live these memories, the world has assured me that distance is indeed difficult, but not at all insurmountable.
And just because we each much take the road less traveled by, does not mean that our paths do not run parallel, and even occasionally come close to intersect again.

In a September 1929 letter to his friend Sidney Cox, Robert Frost writes: “There is no greater fallacy going than that art is expression—an undertaking to tell all to the last scrapings of the brain pan.” I’d like to poke around a little and inquire into certain conditions of “authorship” that justify Frost’s dismissal of this “fallacy.”

The incompatibility of pure “expression” and “composition” stems first of all from the transformation—described by  T.S. Eliot, Frost, and other poets—of the subjective into the objective. I have in mind here the operation of “extrinsic” or “impersonal” motives upon “intrinsic” and “personal” ones. The idea that the “inner” materials of the artist are “re-formed” by the “outer” materials with (and in) which he must work—a language first of all, but then, within that language, the more confining disciplines of form and genre, say;—this idea helps us better understand a reading of “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” given by Frost himself in his 1946 essay “The Constant Symbol.”

Richard Poirier (1925-2009)

The cover of what remains to this date the best book ever written about Frost

Much commentary on “Stopping By Woods” has suggested that the poem expresses, in some way, a desire for self-annihilation. The idea is well-handled by Richard Poirier in Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing: “The recognition of the power of nature, especially of snow, to obliterate the limits and boundaries of things and of his own being is, in large part, a function here of some furtive impulse toward extinction, an impulse no more predominate in Frost than in nature.” Frank Lentricchia makes a similar point about Frost’s winter landscapes in general, and quotes an apt passage from Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space: “In the outside world, snow covers all tracks, blurs the road, muffles every sound, conceals all colors. As a result of this universal whiteness, we feel a form of cosmic negation in action.” During Frost’s lifetime, however, the matter was handled much less sensitively. Readers sometimes set his teeth on edge with intimations about “personal” themes in the poem, as if it expressed a wish quite literally for suicide, or marked some especially dark passage in the poet’s life. Louis Mertins reports that Frost once spoke to him as follows (similar remarks may be found in transcripts of a number of Frost’s public readings):

I suppose people think I lie awake nights worrying about what people like John Ciardi of The Saturday Review write and publish about me. Now Ciardi is a nice fellow—one of those bold, brassy fellows who go ahead and say all sorts of things. He makes my “Stopping By Woods” out a death poem. Well, it would be like this if it were: I’d say, “This is all very lovely, but I must be getting on to heaven.” There’d be no absurdity in that. That’s all right, but it’s hardly a death poem. Just as if I should say here tonight, “This is all very well, but I must be getting on to Phoenix, Arizona, to lecture there.”

William Pritchard, among the one or two best readers of Frost.

Frost often couples intimations of private suffering with statements about their irrelevance. William Pritchard describes the practice well in pointing out how Frost typically “holds back any particular reference to his private sorrows while bidding us to respond to the voice of a man who has been acquainted with grief.” It is worth bearing in mind that, later in the conversation with Louis Mertins, Frost says: “If you feel it, let’s just exchange glances and not say anything about it. There are a lot of things between best friends that’re never said, and if you—if they’re brought out, right out, too baldly, something’s lost.”

The best general introduction to Frost ever done, tactful, succinct, crystal clear.

To similar effect, he writes in a letter to Sidney Cox: “Poetry is a measured amount of all we could say an [i.e., if] we would. We shall be judged finally by the delicacy of our feeling for when to stop short. The right people know, and we artists should know better than they know.” I think inevitably of T. S. Eliot in “Tradition and the Individual Talent“: “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.” He has in mind the sort of readers and writers Frost acknowledges here: “The right people know, and we artists should know better than they know.” In any case, Frost’s caveat to Mertins is probably meant both subtly to validate Ciardi’s suggestion about “Stopping By Woods” and to lay a polite injunction against it.

But his turning aside of Ciardi’s reading is more than an example of tact. He speaks out of fidelity to his belief that the emotions which give rise to a poem are in some way alienated by the poem in the result. His alternative reading of “Stopping By Woods”—the one he gives in “Then Constant Symbol”—is worth dwelling on, let’s say, as a roundabout contribution to a theory of personality and motive in poetry. Frost directs our attention not to the poem’s theme or content but to its form: the interlocking pattern of rhyme that links the stanzas. He once remarked to an audience at Bread Loaf, again discouraging biographical (and too flagrantly thematic) readings of the poem: “If I were reading it for someone else, I’d begin to wonder what he’s up to. See, not what he means but what he’s up to.” The emphasis is on the performance of the writer and on the act of writing. Following are the poem and Frost’s brief comments on it in “The Constant Symbol”:

From the 1923 edition of "New Hampshire." I stumbled across this copy of the book at The Strand Bookstore in New York. It was priced at $4.00. Apparently no-one at the store had troubled himself to leaf through the pages and see whether any were signed or initialed. The initials were inscribed by the poet, apparently at a reading he gave at Vassar College on 9 December 1959.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

There’s an indulgent smile I get for the recklessness of the unnecessary commitment I made when I came to the first line in the second stanza of a poem in this book called “Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening.” I was riding too high to care what trouble I incurred. And it was all right so long as I didn’t suffer deflection.

—from “The Constant Symbol,” as printed in the 1946 Modern Library edition of his poetry

In emphasizing the lyric’s form, in the brief remarks immediately above, Frost really only defers the question of theme or content. It is not that the poem doesn’t have a theme, or one worth a reader’s consideration. The form simply is the theme. If this seems surprising, that’s only because Frost’s emphasis makes for so complete a reversal in mood, in affect. The mood of the poem at this second level of form-as-theme is anything but suggestive of self-annihilation: “I was riding too high to care what trouble I incurred.”

Cover of the second edition (1992)

This is the kind of transformation Poirier has in mind when he remarks in The Performing Self (1971), quoting an interview with Frost originally published in the Paris Review in 1960: “If a poem expresses grief,  it also expresses—as an act, as a composition, a performance, a `making’—the opposite of grief; it shows or expresses `what a hell of a good time I had writing it.’”

The "Paris Review" logo designed by William Pène du Bois.

And I’d point out further that Frost’s remarks, appearing as they do in “The Constant Symbol,” lends the last two lines of “Stopping By Woods” added resonance: “promises” are still the concern, though in “The Constant Symbol” he speaks of them as commitments to poetic form. Read in these terms, “Stopping By Woods” brings more fully into view the artist’s negotiation of the responsibilities of his craft. What may seem to most readers hardly a “meta-poetical” lyric—that is to say, a poem about how poems work, or about why poems are written—actually addresses the central concern of the poet as a poet—that is, when the form of the poem is, as I say, taken as its theme. The question immediately presents itself, however, of a possible disjunction between form and theme, even as they seem to work in tandem. The “unnecessary commitment” that exhilarated Frost—a rhyme scheme that interlinks the stanzas—does in fact “suffer deflection” in the last stanza. Here there are four matched end-rhymes, not three. Promises are broken, not kept, as Frost relinquishes the pattern he carried through the first three stanzas.

Reproduced from a fascimile of the first edition of "The Temple" (1638)

Of course, as John Ciardi points out in the Saturday Review article alluded to above, this relinquishment is really built into the design itself: the only way not to break the pattern would have been to rhyme the next-to-last line of the poem with the first, thereby creating a symmetrical, circular rhyme-scheme, such as might have pleased George Herbert. (Cf. “Sin’s Round,” to the right, wherein the scheme makes a closed circuit of the poem, in keeping, of course, with its theme.) Frost chose not to keep this particular promise, with the result that the progress of the poem illustrates one form of the lassitude that it apparently resigns itself to being a stay against—to put the matter somewhat paradoxically. Paradox is only fitting, however, in acknowledging the mixture of motives animating the poem: motives, on the one hand, of self-relinquishment in what Poirier calls Frost’s “recognition of the power of nature . . . to obliterate the limits and boundaries of things and of his own being”; and motives, on the other hand, of self-assertion and exhilaration in what Frost calls the experience of “riding high.” Frost’s remark about E.A. Robinson’s poetry in the introduction he wrote for Robinson’s 1935 book King Jasper seems to apply rather well to “Stopping By Woods”: “So sad and at the same time so happy in achievement.” “Stopping By Woods,” in short, explodes the “fallacy” that “art is expression—an undertaking to tell all to the last scrapings of the brain pan,” in the following way: by intimating its darker concerns, even unto a vague desire for “extinction” (as Poirier puts it); and by sublimating these darker concerns, through the work of form, into an experience as “exhilarating” as had been whatever darkness lay behind the poem in its first impulse. Frost achieves—to borrow his best-known definition of what a poem affords the poet—his “momentary stay against confusion.” He “rides high.”

A few remarks further. I find “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” perfect in its diction. The clarity of it is such that any schoolboy might read it, and yet the poem nonetheless remains so rich and strange. Notice how gently Frost deploys what few metaphors there are in the poem, so gently as to make them seem hardly “metaphorical” at all. The woods are said to “fill up” with snow, quite as if they might somehow “contain” it. Notice also how “downy flake” both describes the mere look of the falling snow, and suggests such “down” as might be consistent with the alluring wish intimated in the poem to go into these “dark” woods and “sleep,” as if nestled in a kind of bedding. “Care charmer sleep, son of the sable night,” says Samuel Daniel, “Brother to Death, in silent darkness born.” Surely something of this conventional topic—sleep as “brother” or “second self” to death, which is everywhere to be found in English Renaissance poetry—lies back of “Stopping by Woods.” And yet, as I say, the few metaphors I’ve spoken of are as subdued in their effects as is the poem muted in its affect. And then, with that repetend at the poem’s end, we are carried off into what Frost liked to call “ulteriority”: the further reaches of the poem, whose darker implications Richard Poirier so well describes.

I should mention one more thing in closing. A controversy arose over the punctuation of line thirteen of the poem when Edward Connery Lathem altered it for his 1969 The Poetry of Robert Frost, which was, until the Library of America issued its Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays in 1995, the standard edition. Lathem re-punctuated the line: “The woods are lovely, dark, and deep.” As Poirier points out in Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing, the punctuation of the original, where “dark and deep” are set as if in apposition to “lovely,” allows the “loveliness” to “partake of the depth and the darkness which make the woods so ominous.” By contrast, Lathem’s single added comma makes of the adjectives “lovely, dark, and deep” a mere series, each element of which separately modifies “woods.” In any case, the problem, to the extent that it was one, has been rectified, as I say, by the Library of America edition, which follows the original punctuation of Frost’s poems throughout.

N.B. For a link to such poetry by Frost as is now in the public domain, click here. For a link to the major works of Richard Poirier, click here. For a link to editions of George Herbert’s The Temple at the Internet Archive, click here.

It is fun to know some winter songs that are not religious. 

The kid’s poetry section of a local bookstore was selling Susan Jeffers’ illustration of “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening,”  the poem by Robert Frost.  The illustrations make you feel like you are outside on a crisp snowy day.  I thrilled at the memory of romping through woods as a young girl, catching myself alone in a wild place.  The books feels like a celebration with its velum dust jacket and blue foil lettering.  One favorite page accompanies the line “and downy flake,” with delicate snow crystal drawings that look like they were taken from Wilson Bentley photographs.  Another notable page accompanies the first uttering of “And miles to go before I sleep,” with birds decorating a leafless snow sprinkled tree.  I bought it hoping against hope someone had written singable music for it.

Free downloadable audio tour shines a literary light on the nation’s capital

CHICAGO—The Poetry Foundation is pleased to announce the launch of the Washington, DC, Poetry Tour. The interactive tour, freely available at www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrytour, reveals our nation’s capital through the eyes of its great poets, including Walt Whitman, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Elizabeth Bishop, among many others. From the hallowed halls of the federal buildings to neighborhood side streets, the tour features poems written in and about DC, as well as original photographs by poet Thomas Sayers Ellis.

Narrator and inaugural poet Elizabeth Alexander leads the tour from the stacks of the Library of Congress to Civil War battlefields to the Capitol steps, from the National Zoo to the U Street Corridor to the Busboys & Poets Café. Archival recordings from canonical poets including Langston Hughes, Robert Hayden, Sterling Brown, Randall Jarrell, and Ezra Pound chronicle DC’s rich literary history, while contemporary poets such as Linda Pastan, Quique Avilés, Yusef Komunyakaa, Naomi Ayala, A.B. Spellman, and Jane Shore share their experiences, through both poetry and commentary, of national monuments and monumental poets alike.

The DC Poetry Tour presents the development of the capital’s poetry scene over the last century and a half, from its interplay with musicians Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, and Ben Webster, to the creation of the office of poet laureate, to the legendary literary salons hosted by Georgia Douglas Johnson, to the multifaceted work of numerous poet-activist groups. Local poets and scholars—including E. Ethelbert Miller, director of the Afro-American Studies Resource Center at Howard University; David Gewanter of Georgetown University; and Kim Roberts, editor of Beltway magazine—provide the framework for understanding the moments and movements that have shaped DC’s literary culture.

Listeners to the tour, which includes 34 stops throughout the National Mall and Northwest DC, learn that Washington is not only our government’s headquarters but an important American literary capital as well. Historical images and artifacts provide a glimpse into DC’s storied past, while photographs by poet Thomas Sayers Ellis, who was born and raised in Washington, give viewers an inside look at DC’s neighborhoods and people. Poem text is presented along with original audio recordings and archival images, as listeners step into the national arenas that continue to inspire poets today.

“Tracing the history of American poetry against the culture and geography of our national capital helps readers develop a better sense of our shared literary heritage,” notes Anne Halsey, media director of the Poetry Foundation. “Poetry lovers visiting Washington can download free audio tours and maps to take guided poetry walking tours of the National Mall or Northwest DC—but you don’t have to be in DC to explore the city’s literary history. The full multimedia tour can also be experienced virtually at poetryfoundation.org/poetrytour.”

Beginning at the Library of Congress—the home of the first Poetry Consultant, Archibald MacLeish—the tour discusses the contributions of such heralded poets as Robert Lowell, Robert Frost, and William Carlos Williams. MacLeish declares, “A poem should not mean / But be.” Later, Williams fashions a modernist American poetry: “Never reverse a phrase that is your language as you speak it . . . Then you’ve started to create a culture in your place as you are.”

Contemporary poets from throughout the Beltway also present poems. Poets such as Brian Gilmore, who relates his personal interest in Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Myra Sklarew, who discusses May Miller, recognize the influence of their predecessors, reflecting upon them as President John F. Kennedy did when he spoke of Robert Frost: “Our national strength matters; but the spirit which informs and controls our strength matters just as much. This was the special significance of Robert Frost.”

The Washington, DC, Poetry Tour, an original production of the Poetry Foundation created in collaboration with Tierra Innovation, was written and produced by Curtis Fox. Special collaborators on the project include Grace Cavalieri, Katie Davis, Patricia Gray, E. Ethelbert Miller, and Beltway magazine editor Kim Roberts.

For more information, go to http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrytour

Photo by VC Ferry

“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.”

~ Robert Frost

VC Ferry

All Rights Reserved

© 2009

Reluctance by Robert Frost

Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
And looked at the world, and descended;
I have come by the highway home,
And lo, it is ended.

The leaves are all dead on the ground,
Save those that the oak is keeping
To ravel them one by one
And let them go scraping and creeping
Out over the crusted snow,
When others are sleeping.

And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,
No longer blown hither and thither;
The last long aster is gone;
The flowers of the witch-hazel wither;
The heart is still aching to seek,
But the feet question ‘Whither?’

Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?

The tome in all its glory ~click through for a closer look~

Which would you choose? This tome was waiting for me in the middle of my desk one recent Monday morning. I’d already been offered the promotion, but the spiral bound beast of a book made it suddenly real. Robert Frost’s poem – along with my life – flashed before my eyes. Was I really going to become a geophysical technician?

Almost everyone I surveyed pushed for “Yes!” Huge pay increase, new skill-set, broader career options… how could I say no? Not to mention give up the unprecedented honour of being the first Printing Supervisor (aka Paper Roller) to ever be given the opportunity to start training up the geophysical food chain. Flattered? Yes. Tempted? Sure.

But…

There’s a reason why people say they “fell” into their jobs. Do I want a passive, accidental future? Do you? We live in an incredible era of choice. While it’s true that such freedom can be crippling – the studies have been done -  we may as well take advantage of our post-modern culture while we can. For the first time in human history, there is enough flexibility, in terms of our basic survival, for us to pursue our passions. There is a cost, of course. Once one takes an active roll in one’s future, there is that heavy, inescapable pressure of having to back up words with work – hard work. What to choose?

I said no.    

What now? All I can do is keep listing to that little voice, the one that wants so badly. What’s yours whispering in your ear? Mine wants to write, to challenge, to design, to explore. I don’t know what happens from here, but I have faith in the future. And as long as I keep writing towards it, I’ll know I’m on the right road.

Note: Yes, that is Will Wheaton - aka Wesley Crusher from Star Trek TNG - straddling my office moisturizer. How does that intro go again? To boldly go where no one has gone before…  how apropos.

There’s something really spooky about this ‘keepsake’ postcard of a turkey farm. Even the name of the place seems to have subtle overtones of the otherworldly. I mean really – “Fry Brothers”? And then the idea of a turkey ‘ranch’ (?) (what happened to farms for birds?) with the ‘dining rooms’ right next to it?

I’m no scaredy-cat or prissy missy when it comes to the fact that yes, we do have to kill our food before we eat it (unless we decide to eat it raw and wriggling) but really. There’s something either tactless or insinuatingly Twilight Zone-ish about this whole thing.

The photo itself looks as if aliens have come to take over the planet, and the fact that the back of the card bought as momento (momento? why?) of this place is blank, totally blank, seems to smack of some strange occurrence happening here. As a matter of fact, the back wouldn’t even take a clear photo. All fuzzy and strangely lit, every single time I tried.

I have to wonder if they made it out alive.

Nevertheless, Fry Bros. Turkey Ranch and Dining Rooms is in fact a real place still in operation, and it gets surprisingly good reviews. Just look at this one

I would highly recommend this restaurant to anyone I also stayed for a few nights at the turkey ranch. The whole atmosphere is out of this world and would come back again

“Out of this world???” (What did I tell you . . .!)

And then there is this one

If you go, get something that is turkey. Why go to a place called the Turkey Ranch and order anything else. We were just passing thru on the way to New York, but they were a great place to stop. If I take that route again, I would go here again.

What is this, code? “Get something that is turkey,” (?) But there is much philosophy in the end of the note. “If I take that route again . . .”

I have to ask myself – “What Would Robert Frost Do?”

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

and i could tell

what form my dreaming was about to take.

Photos taken by: Joanna Etshokin

Text written by: Robert Frost (1946: AFTER APPLE PICKING)