Tag Archives: Robert Frost

POETS Day! Edward Thomas

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Illustrated by Rene Sears

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

It’s a brand-new year with a brand-new slate of sick days tempting you to do evil. Don’t waste those quite yet. A half day’s like a skip day you didn’t sleep through the first half of and if you playthings right, there’s fifty-two of them. That’s a lot. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

Happy New Year.

Seize the afternoon and enjoy the remains of a Friday on your terms. But first, some verse.

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Everybody knows Robert Frost’s famous poem “The Road Not Taken.” Most of us, myself included, are told that it’s an anthem, a call to individualism, by a teacher. It’s presented to us young. Someone gives us the gist – usually in lauding, reverent tones – and we read it as accepting sponges.

I never questioned the received assessment. For years I unfairly filed the poem, and Frost too, away as starter kit stuff; Johnson’s Baby Poetry, to mangle a line from P.J. O’Rourke. People with a desire to seriously immerse themselves in a subject like poetry—dive in and learn the whats and whyfores—need to shed assumptions. I didn’t do that. I assumed that since I “knew” about Frost and “The Road Not Taken,” it couldn’t be all that great; jingoistic popular stuff. I wanted the esoterica. That was dumb.

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POETS Day! Robert Frost

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[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

If you don’t sell beer, hot dogs, fireworks, gauze, charcoal brickettes, or are named Joey Chestnut you probably didn’t work on Tuesday. Independence Day, and the lounging inherent, is your inheritance as a citizen. But it was Tuesday. Even if you went in on Monday, did you really work? Is there any point in trying to claim productivity on a three-day work week? Accept the loss and claim the weekend now. Piss Off Early. Tomorrow’s Saturday.

CHORUS: Dissemble, obfuscate, fudge the truth, and gleefully trespass the norms and delicate pieties that preserve our hopefully durable civilization. Nearly all means are justified by the urge to prematurely escape the bonds of employment and settle in at a friendly neighborhood joint a few hours before even happy hour begins, lay comfortably in the grass at a local park, go for a swim, or God forbid, go for a light jog. It’s your weekend.

Do with it as you will, but in homage to the mighty acronym may I suggest setting aside a moment for a little verse? It’s a particularly good way to pass time waiting on friends who may not run as roughshod over the delicate pieties and were not as successful as you were in engineering an early exit.

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“Have just discovered another Amur’kn. Vurry Amur’kn, with, I think, the seeds of grace.”
-Ezra Pound in a March, 1913 letter to Alice Corbin Henderson of Poetry

The image of Robert Frost in my, and I assume many people’s, mind doesn’t jibe with what I conjure when thinking “Modern Poetry.”

I think of Eliot and Yeats out fastidiousing each other while Pound prowls the room in a feathered sombrero that matches his green velvet suit with blue glass buttons. H.D. oozes weird-girl-who-wears-black between visits to the flapper closet. Amy Lowell fixating, Wyndam Lewis – more of a painter but still – looking like an evil silent movie capitalist cum Byron, Wallace Stevens – no matter how buttoned down he’s supposed to have been – getting punched by Hemingway. All those varied and diverse figures share a crackling intensity. Not Frost.

Even trying to picture him in his late thirties as a newly minted expatriate, I still imagine him a grandfatherly figure who speaks a folksy but erudite Live Bait & General with a Hahvahd lilt. That image doesn’t fit with the other Moderns. He’s Sha Na Na at Woodstock.

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