by Jennifer

Where learning bled
Where learning left and left us red

I’ve been reading and thinking about Robert Frost the past few days (the words above are mine, not his). I wanted to include an image of my hometown, Granby, CT, but I don’t have one—because it’s the place I first heard and read Frost. As a child, I found a notebook in our house with “The Road Not Taken” written by hand, without an attribution. I wondered then if one of my parents wrote it. Later I studied with Bill Pritchard at Amherst, who told us that when Frost taught, he threw their papers down the stairs and graded each according to where it landed.

In “The Last Refinement of Subject Matter: Vocal Imagination,” Frost wrote: “Poets have lamented the lack in poetry of any such notation as music has for suggesting sound. But it is there and always has been there. The sentence is the notation. The sentence is before all else just that: a notation for suggesting significant tones of voice. With the sentence that doesn’t suggest significant tones of voice, poetry has no concern whatever.” Neither William Carlos Williams nor Wallace Stevens worked in this way; in fact, I can’t think of another American poet of Frost’s era that did, but maybe you can?

About seven years ago, I decided to work more deliberately with rhyme in my poems, and gave myself the task of writing only things I could remember and speak. I don’t think this was a great success in terms of what I produced, but it was helpful in terms of returning to the kind of song that drew me to poetry in the first place. A fellow poet said he heard Frost in the poems. For sure I didn’t manage the kind of sentences Frost speaks of; most of the poems were one long sentence. I thought I’d record them tonight and then opened the file and it was 38 pages, so I just did a few. The one that begins with “Weeping turns” is probably the closest in cadence to Frost. It’s hard not to think of Yeats saying “Rhetoric is the will trying to do the work of the imagination”.  If you have patience, you can listen here.