Terror, Lab Coats and Gloves

            Late on Wednesday morning I got a call from Tracy Buchanan, the model coordinator at OCADU. She said she had a last minute cancellation and wondered if I could be at the college in 45 minutes. I told her I could but I’d better not because I had to work on an essay. I always feel guilty about turning down work and perhaps a little afraid that if I turn it down then I won’t be offered it next time. I usually don’t pass up those kinds of offers and though I didn’t get around to working on my essay, working that day would have delayed me from working on it another day because of all the other things I had to do.

            When Tracy called I was in the middle of a tech dilemma because I was trying to upload to my computer the photos I took with my phone the day before. Just plugging my phone into the USB didn’t do much of anything. My PC acknowledged the Moto e4 but said the folder was empty. On the phone it was Google that was most prominent and wanted me to use it to transfer the files. I didn’t want to do it through wi-fi. Finally, after digging around my phone I found a buried option for file transfer and I got the photos onto my hard drive. I don’t even remember though how I did it now.

            Another reason I didn’t want to work was because I had my 20^th Century US lit class that night and I wanted to relax at home beforehand.

            I got there fifteen minutes early, as usual and spent my time reading some more of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl.

            When class started, Scott said we would start right away with a film about Robert Frost. He commented first though that Frost’s poetry tends to be taught badly, as if he were a nature poet. Scott declared, “He was the poet of terror!” and promised that we would look into why he was so misunderstood.

            The video from the Unites States National Endowment for the Humanities began. The name Elizabeth Bishop appeared on screen. The title was Voices and Visions and the first voice was that of a woman reciting, “There are too many waterfalls …” and later on in the poem, “rain, like politicians speeches …” It seemed off for Frost to directly speak of politicians in a poem.

            After about three minutes Scott got up and said that he’d clinked the wrong link. This was a movie about the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. Scott switched it and we finally got the one about Robert Frost, which began with Frost speaking, “Matthew Arnold said that nature is cruel … Nature is always more or less cruel … I want to reach out to all sorts and kinds … These poems are written in parable …”

            He became his own myth.

            “The saw snarled and rattled …”

            “Poetry is organized violence upon language … A way of taking life by the throat.”

            From the clip of Frost reading “The Gift Outright” at Kennedy’s inauguration:  “The land was ours before we were the land’s …”

            “I am not a nature poet. There is almost always a person in my poems … only two poems without a human being … Don’t be too arbor-trary.”

            “Who first recognizes a good one? Not the village …”

            “I kept farms as a fugitive from the world … A symbolic farmer … A symbolic teacher …”

            Listening to all the poetry ever written before starting to write would have taken too long.

            The poem, “Mowing” has a fresh, subtle mixture of rhythms, including those of lulling and consoling. “What was it it whispered?”

            Frost does not work in large structures. There are no epics, cantos or suites and so there is no need for advance planning. He is a lyric poet. He does not go to the poem but lets the poem come to him. Start with a happy perception. There is a statement. One arrives at wisdom.

            He wrote Apple Picking without fumbling a line. There are overtones and displacements to the words. Apple picking takes place between heaven and earth. It is not a poem about death but rather of hibernation.

            By 1912 he had written some of his greatest poems but only a few had been published. When he was young, Frost’s best book was “Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics”, in which he discovered Keats, Tennyson and Chaucer. The best way to be known as a great America poet was to be received well in England where there was a vital literary community, including Yeats and Pound. He sold his farm and to establish his credentials, took his family to England, the land of the golden treasury where F. S. Flint introduced him to Pound. He published his first book right away. He settled right down and did not travel. Reviews by Ezra Pound and Edward Thomas helped his success.

            Frost and Thomas became good friends and went for long walks together. On one of those treks they were confronted by a gamekeeper on Lord Beecham’s estate who accused them of trespassing. Frost almost came to blows with the keeper but the man pulled a gun on him.

            “I can mock anything out of my system.”

            Frost said of Wilfred Gibson that he is one of the plain folk with nothing of the literary poseur about him.

            Frost said poetry is the sound of sense and sentence sounds. “I alone have consciously set myself to make music. The most original writer only catches words fresh from talk.

            “The Mending Wall” is too easily understood.

            Eliot addressed Frost as a regional poet.

            One of the commentators in the video said that the poem he wished he’d written was Frost’s “Home Burial”.

            Frost returned from England in 1915 and bought a farm in Vermont. He stuck to poetry and family. He met his wife in high school.

            “The Wood-Pile” is self-referential.

            “My poems are little bits of order.” So are smoke rings.

            Frost insisted that modernist despair was harmful.

            “Every poem is a momentary stay against the confusion of the world.”

            In 1938 Elinor Frost died of a heart attack. This was the second of three losses in six years.  Four years before that his daughter died while giving birth and two years later his son committed suicide. Of his wife Frost wrote: “My, my what sorrow runs through all she wrote to you children … She was not as original as I in thought but she dominated my art with the power of her character … she came to resent something in the life I had given her”.

            “Acquainted With The Night”.

            Frost resisted making recordings and appearing on television at first, but he was a ham at heart.

            His poems were very popular with soldiers.

            He is associated with living at university.

            He joked about all of the honorary degrees he’d received as “degree-dation” and that he had been educated by degrees.

            He predicted that Kennedy would be president. “You can tell how I vote from my books. I’m a Democrat. But I’ve been unhappy since 1896.”

            The great bard of adrenaline. He was not a gentle New England poet. He was ferocious. He had the guts to write about fear and hatred. He inhabits the world at body heat.

            “Never again would bird’s song be the same.”

            We took a break.

            Because of the last time I’d gone to the washroom in the basement it was flooded, I decided to try out the one on the second floor. Someone in the building has added the homey touch of three well-maintained potted plants on the window ledge of the first landing and a larger one at the top.

            It took me a while to find the men’s room because I first walked in the wrong direction. In the hallway was a janitor pushing what looked like a mini-zamboni. The washroom door had a very old sign with trickly brown stains on it and the upper left corner was bent. I was puzzled and a little frightened by the message: “gloves and lab coats to be worn in the washroom.” I hesitated and lifted the upper left corner of the sign to reveal that the sentence actually began with “No”.

            After the break we looked at some of Robert Frost’s poems.

            The first was “Mending Wall”. Scott asked what we tend to mend. I said clothing and bodies.

            Is “mending” here an adjective or a verb?

            There is wordplay with “give offense” 

            It’s a poem about the creative process.

            I said the speaker initiates the mending of the wall by contacting his neighbour on the other side, but he does so because mending the wall together is the only way they can behave as if there is no wall between them.

            A mature female student that sits in the front row said that she’d read that women converse face to face while men converse side by side.

            The next poem was “The Road Not Taken”.

            Take the road no one takes. Self-reliance is a myth because it’s really random. It’s a poem about Frost’s friend Edward Thomas who was chronically indecisive. When they went for their long walks, Thomas would often joke that they should have gone the other way.

            It’s about the lies we tell ourselves.

            Of “Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening”, Robert Frost predicted that this poem was the one that people would remember most.

            It’s “Whose woods these are I think I know” and not “I know whose woods these are.” There is a perfection of simple and rhythmic language.

            Scott asked what “stopping by” usually means. I said visiting.

            The fact that he doesn’t want to slow down and be seen suggests a weakness. Stopping is not industrious.

            The third line is always picked up in a rhyme with the first line in the next stanza.

            The falling snow is a burial. Does he mean death?

            “The darkest evening of the year” is the winter solstice. But does he mean his own darkest hour?

            The last poem we looked at was “Design”. It’s an Italian sonnet. They usually begin with a question, but he flipped it.

            The spider is fat because it has just eaten. This poem is more imagistic than his usual works. A white spider on a white flower. Overly white things lose definition. What would “a white piece of rigid satin cloth” be used for. Someone said to line a coffin. Scott suggested a bridal gown.

            The word “appall” could also be read as “a pall” which is a cloth covering for a coffin.

            The speaker must be lying in the grass to be able to see all of this.

            This is much more highly constructed than his usual poems. There is never a wrong word.

            I asked Scott why he had declared that Robert Frost was “the poet of terror”. I couldn’t see anything in his craft that would indicate that he was trying to convey terror. There was darkness, yes, and some fear, but terror seems pretty intense for such reflective poetry. Scott cited the poem we just covered and said that the reference to a dark design is terrifying.

            As I was unlocking my bike the skinny student with the beard stopped to argue with me about the idea of terror. I sort of acknowledged that a dark design could be terrifying but that for most of Frost’s work there is nothing terrifying. Terror usually means intense fear in anticipation of an event and horror is intense fear after an event. I think you can draw terror out of his and many other poems but I don’t think their primary intention is to evoke terror.

            I needed a quick dinner when I got home, so I made pizza bread with two slices of whole grain bread, some gourmet tomato paste from a tube and old cheddar cheese.