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

Recognize this? Well, if you haven't read it yet, you will soon. Tell your teachers to get on that! It's The Road Not Taken, the classic Robert Frost poem that every student absolutely MUST read before he/she gets to high school. I'm not going to link it here because it's just so important that you have to go find it yourself. It's totally worth it and will take you about three seconds to find. At any rate, it is a poem about self-discovery, originiality, and yes, even anti-establishment. Oh, and it all takes place in the most pastoral of scenes. Ahhh.

Why am I talking about this poem? Well, to introduce you to Robert Frost for starters. He was a poet who, as a young boy, often heard voices in his head. His mother told him that he shared her "second sight", while his father continued to drink away the years.

What does any of this have to do with poetry? Hmm. Well, alot, actually. One of the best ways to appease the voices in your head is to write them out of you. I'm not saying that Frost wrote because of this. I'm just suggesting that you might.

Wow. ANYWAY.... we are here today to talk about a new Robert Frost poem (new to us anyway). Frost has been dead for nearly 40 years but since when has that kept the great ones from their art? His latest poem, "War Thoughts at Home" was handwritten in a copy of a close friend's book. That friend was Frederic G. Melcher, and the poem is partly about him.

According to the Virginia Quarterly Review, "War Thoughts at Home" embodies the stories of two great friends in Frost's life. The first was Edward Thomas--who died in the trenches during World War I--and the poem narrates Frost's ambivalence about the war that claimed Thomas's life. The story of the other friend picks up where the first leaves off. It is the story of a new beginning for Frost in his friendship with Frederic G. Melcher, a rising star in the book trade, and it was Melcher who preserved this lost passage of Frost's poetic thoughts about the war.

Here is a brief excerpt of "War Thoughts at Home"

On the backside of the house
Where it wears no paint to the weather
And so shows most its age,
Suddenly blue jays rage
And flash in blue feather.

It is late in an afternoon
More grey with snow to fall
Than white with fallen snow
When it is blue jay and crow
Or no bird at all.

The entire poem is printed in the current issue of the Virginia Quaterly Review. Pick one up today!

Wow, college is fun!  I'm taking my first college Creative Writing class -- "Intro to Short Fiction" -- and the 3-hour class goes by much too quickly.  Imagine, reading and writing short stories for "homework"?!  Those are things I love doing for fun! 

I've learned in my class that other people will always have different opinions about your writing.  There are eighteen students in my class, and each week, we critique two or three short stories submitted by our classmates.  Not surprisingly, each week there are eighteen different opinions on how to improve each story!  I've learned that if there is a suggestion about one of my stories that the majority of the class agrees upon -- maybe I need to add more character description, or tighten up the dialogue -- then it is something I should pay attention to.  But trying to please everyone will drive you crazy -- not to mention, it's impossible!  As my writing friend Elizabeth Berg wrote me in a letter, "First, please yourself." Good advice for any area of your life, I think. 

Time flies! Tomorrow will already be one week since I heard Donald Hall--the 14th poet laureate of the United States--read and discuss his work at the National Book Festival in Washington DC.

At age 78, Hall is a prolific and brilliant poet whose writings have been profoundly inspired by place. He spent his summers as a child at his grandparents' farm in New Hampshire. "I've always loved New Hampshire so much that I remembered it all the time when I wasn't living there. I wrote out of memory," he remembered. When he was in his 50s, Hall moved back there to dedicate his life to writing poetry.

Hall lives a life close to nature. Of his work, the former poet laureate Billy Collins has said:

"Hall has long been placed in the Frostian tradition of the plainspoken rural poet. His reliance on simple, concrete diction and the no-nonsense sequence of the declarative sentence gives his poems steadiness and imbues them with a tone of sincere authority. It is a kind of simplicity that succeeds in engaging the reader in the first few lines."

At the National Book Festival, Hall read several poems from his new book White Apples and the Taste of Stone, and talked about his life-long relationship with words. He started writing poetry at age 12 and his first poem was published when he was 16. "The first poet I loved when I was 12 was Edgar Allen Poe." Hall told us. "Then, at age 14, I discovered the modern poets--Hilda Doolittle, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens."

As a young poet, Hall said that he wrote a lot of "very decorative verses" but didn't focus on "personal expression." Over time, he feels he has undergone a process of "gradual nakedness" on the page. He has poured more and more of himself into his work.

What is it about poetry that has made him keep writing all these years? "Poetry expresses a great multiplicity of feelings--it fills the human mind."

I had not read too many of Hall's poems before this event and was intrigued by his comment that when it comes to poetry, "first the sounds, then the meaning" are important. What did he mean by that? I've been pondering that question and it strikes me that the simplest way to explain this is to give you this example:

What is the difference between these two sentences:

The year endured without punctuation. - from Donald Hall's poem "Without"
The 365 days passed without any periods, commas, or exclamation marks.

Same meaning - different sound. The first one, however, evokes a strong feeling of the passage of time ... and the word endured stretches, just like time stretches when it passes slowly.

EXTRA:
* Listen to a podcast of Donald Hall talking about poetry at the National Book Festival. Download.
* Listen to Donald Hall read three of his poems out loud: National Public Radio