Early Morning Writing

Early morning from my east facing window.

The crow calling just outside my window woke me enough to notice how light it was. Must be a least 7. No, only 5:18 a.m. Too early to be up with a long day ahead of me. But as I lay in the guest bed, the quiet was energizing.

I'm staying on top a mountain near East Calais, Vermont, and the beauty of sound and sight and fragrance is balm to my soul. There is no hum of the highway half a mile away; no jarring sirens of emergency vehicles responding to the needs of the one million people living in a single county; no ridiculously heavy footsteps of the family in the apartment above me. Instead, I listen to the calls of birds I can identify (killdeer, crow, robin, some kind of owl) and the songs of those I don't yet know. This quiet is like a drink of cool water on a warm day.

I am inspired to write, energized to do so now. Being in Vermont, I can't help but think of poet Robert Frost. He worked the land, knew the people, and recorded them in verse that grasps their vitality and reality. I feel a kinship to him in shared loves. I am writing in Vermont.

April is National Poetry Month

I'm trying to understand what it is about poetry that excites me. Each year I make a big deal of National Poetry Month at whichever library I happen to be working. Yet, there are many poems that I do not understand. So what is it about poetry that I like?

I began thinking about this as I planned blog posts, tweets, displays and programs for National Poetry Month 2011. When I read the poems that I consider favorites, I see that it's the art of the words that I love. In poetry, words are carefully chosen and strategically arranged to produce a sight, a sound, a smell, a feel, a memory. Following are examples, a few of my favorite poetic lines.

"...sensing only the pale humidity
of the night and the slight zephyrs
that stir the tops of the trees"

from Night Letter to the Reader by Billy Collins.

"Willows whiten, aspens quiver,
Little breezes dusk and shiver
Thro' the wave that runs for ever
By the island in the river
Flowing down to Camelot."
from The Lady of Shalott by Alfred Lord Tennyson

"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."
from Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost

Recently someone suggested to me that the written word is an impersonal form of communication compared with face-to-face conversation. I see it differently. I'm a writer and a reader, and words are the most intimate, most lovely, most heartfelt form of communication. This is what I like about poetry: The precisely chosen beautiful words and the pictures they paint.

Robert Frost: The Derry Years

In March 2010, I was in Middlebury, Vermont, when I was reacquainted with the poet Robert Frost. I’d long been fond of his poem Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. Now I learned that Mr. Frost had spent time in a cabin northwest of Middlebury, and that he had taught at Middlebury College. My interest was piqued.

In The Vermont Bookshop, I looked for a biography and found Robert Frost: A Life by Jay Parini. Parini is a poet, novelist, and biographer serving as Axinn Professor of English at Middlebury College.

For the last year I’ve been savoring the biography, and I took it with me to New Hampshire when I learned that Frost’s farm in Derry was only;12 miles south of the Manchester airport.

Frost’s ten years on the farm in Derry (1901 – 1911) were key in his life as a poet. It was during this time that he developed his own voice. While working with and talking to his New Hampshire neighbors, Frost realized a connection between poetry and conversation. “I was after poetry that talked,” wrote Frost. If my poems were talking poems – if to read one of them you heard a voice – that would be to my liking,” he said (page 88).

Parini writes that, “By the time he [Frost] emerged at the end of this decade of farming, writing, and teaching, he would be fully formed; a major modern poet,” (page 73).

Today the Robert Frost Farm is directly off State Highway 28. I turned left into the muddy driveway, the white farmhouse and barn on my right surrounded by piles of snow. Behind the buildings and yard is a large field, bordered on three sides by pine and birch trees. A couple with baby in a backpack made their way on snowshoes across the field toward the back tree line.

For me, there is a mix of magic and romance in being in the place where someone I know through their writing or art once lived. There is an imagining of the reality of what I’ve read actually occurring in this location. It makes the person more real to me. It makes history live.

I walked the muddy driveway and along the shoulder of Highway 28. The snow was too deep for me to get any closer, or to walk all the way around the house; I did not have snowshoes. The house was closed for the season.

During his Derry years, Robert Frost taught at the Pinkerton Academy, two miles north of his farm, in order to earn extra income. He was a highly regarded teacher by students and colleagues, and was even asked to speak about his teaching philosophy. Parini says Frost focused his talk, “on the need for teachers to develop their own minds before they thought about developing the minds of their students. He [Frost] also said it was important that students be made to feel so dependent on books that without them, ever afterward, they would feel lonely,” (page 99).

I went away knowing more of Robert Frost, inspired to read again Parini’s book, and dedicated to memorizing another Frost poem.