VRZHU bullets of pure love

Ednafication

A few weeks back we posted the idea of commemorating Spring and the iconic photograph of Edna St. Vincent Millay in a blooming tree.  Seemed like a zany but noble idea to bring poets together to recreate this charming image.

We are happy to report that the two Saturday photo sessions at the magnificent Brookland Dogwood tree was a rousing success.

A great number of poets and writers showed up both days and took their Millayesque portraits.  On the fine suggestion of Kim Roberts folks brought picnic items last Saturday and a great little Spring soiree took place under treeshade. 

Appropriately, Terrance Mulligan and Martha Sanchez-Lowery brought some of Millay's poems to be read aloud.  Terry read Millay's poem about Spring (titled "Spring") which clearly shows the bard of Camden, Maine wasn't that crazy about the season.

Spring

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

We also passed Millay's long poem "Renascence" that got her started as a young teenaged writer.  We took turns reading passages aloud under the shade of a nice pine tree adjoining the dogwood. It was an amazing afternoon.

Of course the whole purpose was to take our Ednaesque portraits and we did do that.  To see the portraits and see a list of participating Ednas, please visit the Project Millay page on the main VRZHU Press site at www.vrzhu.com/edna.html

We'd love to receive feedback.  Maybe we can make this an annual event.  Perhaps we can start a tradition for poets to recreate around the country.  Perchance the world.  Any excuse for a picnic, eh?

Leave a comment for the Ednas.

The Millay Project.

Hip-Hop Opera Tuba the Worst Music

Howzabout some hip-hop tuba?  Opera rap?  Well, you got that and a whole lot more unpleasantness in a 25 minutes of the "worst music of all time" in one piece.

This is truly boggling.  Apparently the result of polling data used to determine the most hated parts of music.  Then they squonched all of that alltogether and voila! you have this audio din that just has to be heard.

Here's how the description of the finished product:

The most unwanted music is over 25 minutes long, veers wildly between loud and quiet sections, between fast and slow tempos, and features timbres of extremely high and low pitch, with each dichotomy presented in abrupt transition. The most unwanted orchestra was determined to be large, and features the accordion and bagpipe (which tie at 13% as the most unwanted instrument), banjo, flute, tuba, harp, organ, synthesizer (the only instrument that appears in both the most wanted and most unwanted ensembles). An operatic soprano raps and sings atonal music, advertising jingles, political slogans, and "elevator" music, and a children's choir sings jingles and holiday songs. The most unwanted subjects for lyrics are cowboys and holidays, and the most unwanted listening circumstances are involuntary exposure to commercials and elevator music. Therefore, it can be shown that if there is no covariance--someone who dislikes bagpipes is as likely to hate elevator music as someone who despises the organ, for example--fewer than 200 individuals of the world's total population would enjoy this piece.

You can give it a listen to here.  Pretty hysterical at points.

Tuesday Wrap - Split this Rock, etc.

I missed the Split This Rock Poetry Festival these past four days due to international intrigue.  Or something.

But STR got a lot of well-deserved coverage in lots of places. You can get the skinny here if you also missed it.  Word had been spreading for quite a while.

I'll be checking out the Split This Rock blog, which has some videos of readings and stuff up, and promises to put up more as they get them, which means I won't feel entirely left out, at least after the fact.

Vrzhu publisher Dan Vera showed up here in poetry and elsewhere in person. I'm hoping he'll report here on the festival as an observer, attendee, and participant.

Karren Alenier, aka The Dresser, has some reporting out on her blog here and here and here and here.

Having missed it I can still enjoy the Split This Rock issue of Beltway Poetry Quarterly -- including this brilliant poem by Naomi Ayala, one my big poetry crushes -- and this issue of the Beloit Poetry Journal.

I look forward to hearing about Vrzhu author Kim Roberts' Harlem Renaissance in DC tour.

From the blog posts about the event -- of which I expect to see more and more of as folks report back on the festival -- it was by all accounts an exhilarating success.

I remain in awe of festival organizers and masterminds Melissa Tuckey and the inimitable Sarah Browning as well as the rest of the Split This Rock posse.

UPDATE (Dan here): I was able to get some nice video of Mark Doty and Galway Kinnell's reading.  I've posted it on YouTube and below.

The festival was a great success and the hope is to hold these every two years.

I got some video of Mark Doty's gorgeous reading on Saturday night.  Doty read a number of poems including Walt Whitman's "Over the Carnage Rose Prophetic A Voice."  But I was really stunned by his reading of an earlier poem of his titled "Charlie Howard's Descent" written after the killing of a gay boy in Maine.  The video is below.  Below are links from other videos I posted to Youtube.

Mark Doty reading Whitman:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7HgO3d3AmA

Galway Kinnell stunning reading Paul Celan's "Fugue of Death"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDpaNLaBt0I

VRZHU in the City Paper

VRZHU is happy to note a nice bit of press.  After a great interview with Michael Gushue (or as he's known in our more Ramones-apeing moments, "Michael Vrzhu") The Washington City Paper Arts Editor Amanda Hess featured our efforts in a nice piece titled

"Pertinent Press: How does an upstart poetry publisher pass the bullshit test?"

I can only assume that our inclusion in the piece means we passed the test.  We were delighted to be included with two other great publishing stalwarts whose work we respect and admire, Reb Livington of No Tell Books and Maureen Thorson of Big Game Books. 

And yes, that would be our two mugs on the front page of the City Paper's website.  Nice photo props go to City Paper photographer Darrow Montgomery who managed to make us look earnest and bookish all at once.  I was so getting a crick in my neck from that photo-shoot.  Sadly he didn't take any of my "pouty lips" poses.

Now if you came to the site to see more of VRZHU, check out our fine books!
Kim Roberts' The Kimnama and Hiram Larew's More Than Anything are still available and the best way to begin the new year!  To read a sample from the books and to read the raves from reviewers visit the links above our our books page [here].

And if you're an Edgar Guest disciple here to express your thunderous outrage at Michael Vrzhu's slams on the venerable home-loving poet, leave a comment too.

Robert Frost vs. Hungarian Cuisine

Why is Vrzhu blogging a recipe today?

Well, there is precedent. But that is insufficient.

So, by way of justification. . .

“Jay Parini, a Frost scholar and professor at Middlebury College, also described the difficulty of reading Frost’s “chicken scrawlish” handwriting.” 

–from “Editing of Frost Notebooks in Dispute” By Motoko Rich - New York Times, Jan. 22, 2008 

We here at Vrzhu have been puzzling over the reference in the quote above to the traditional Hungarian dish, Chicken Scrawlish.  Perhaps Mr. Parini was giving a tip of the hat to Hungary as one of the great producers of world-class poets, far in excess of larger countries, with a respect for and tradition of poetry comparable to, say, Ireland? Or is he referring to the rumor that, while in England, Frost was able to employ an immigrant Hungarian as a housekeeper for about a month in the fall of 1913, and afterwards Frost would sometimes make a folksy reference to her “chicken scrawlish?.”

This is indeed a riddle inside an enigma wrapped in a flour tortilla. But Vrzhu is in search of a key.

To start, here is an unpublished article from Gourmand Monthly we have obtained which sheds some light on the culinary trompe langue that is Chicken Scrawlish.

Chicken Scrawlish (Chicken Szcralís) – Originally a peasant dish from the Northern Medium Mountain region of northern Hungary, which is part of the Southern Carpathian Mountains of  southwestern Slovakia.  A dense stew that is formed into loaves for the winter, Chicken Scrawlish is undoubtedly the least popular dish in Hungary.  Georgi Mandi, a noted culinary archivist, has said that “if paprikash is considered the royalty of Hungarian cooking, then the concoction known as Chicken Scrawlish must be rated as Hungary’s failed apprentice pig herder. Famed Hungarian chef Egbert Esterhaszy concurs: “To a Hungarian, paprikash, sausage, poppy seed noodles—these all say “mother.” Chicken Scrawlish, on the other hand, says “idiot third cousin kept hidden from company in the root cellar.”

But generally, most Hungarians either deny the existence of a dish called Chicken Scrawlish, or vociferously insist that it is not Hungarian but Slovakian. At the same time Slovak citizens in the Carpathian mountains across the border from Hungary will swear that only a Hungarian would be able to eat a dish like chicken scrawlish. There are local city ordinances still extant stating that “persons found to have a loaf or block of Szcralis on their body or among their belongings will be fined 1,000 korunas.” 

These laws may have been an attempt to discourage “Scrawlishmen.” Because of the difficulties inherent in preparing Chicken Scrawlish, it became common for unemployed men or men who had fallen off their horses onto their heads to become itinerant Chicken Scrawlish vendors, or Scrawlishmen, going from farm to farm and village to village trying to trick the more slatternly wives into buying a jar of potted Scrawlish.  Often runners from one farm would speed ahead to the next farm to warn of the approaching Scrawlishman, so that an adequate supply of stones of sufficient heft could be gathered to throw at him.

Despite this, dedicated, perhaps foolhardy, foodies, inspired by culinary adventurers (such as Anthony Bordain) who sample puffin jerky, or warthog chitterlings, have been looking for a traditional recipe—or any recipe—for the infamous Chicken Scrawlish.

Recently, American investigatory cooks, Jack and Michelle Gurning, have interviewed several immigrants from the region, and found a recipe for the dish hidden in an old bible written in Hungarian. The recipe was on previously-used vellum and sandwiched between pages of the Book of Revelation.  The Gurnings, in their book, Into Thick Soup –  A Personal Account of Delight and Disaster Amongst the Wild Dishes of the Carpathians, provide their deciphered and translated rendition of the recipe.  Their only introductory description of Chicken Scrawlish is “a dish only H. P. Lovecraft could love. Or adequately describe.”

Chicken Scrawlish

One unplucked chicken, preferably dead.
16 oz rendered badger fat
4 oz dry-cured chicken liver
18 oz unhulled groats
2 teaspoons rock salt
2 teaspoons chopped baitfish, such as minnow
6 to 8 cups goat broth, or squirrel broth
1 cup chopped celery root
1 cup chopped sun-dried beet
1 cup chopped kohlrabi, root and leaves.
1/2 cup onion grass
4 oz juniper berries
1 teaspoon hot paprika
1 teaspoon devil’s parsley
¼ cup hyssop sour wine or hyssop white vinegar.
¼ cup woodruff jam

1. First, the chicken must be “saddled.” After gutting the bird, spatchcock it*, retaining the neck and head. Press it flat, pulling to extend the wings and legs as much as possible.

2. Place the spatchcocked chicken between the saddle and the horse, feathered side down (alternatively the chicken may be pressed between two goats).  After a three day ride** remove the chicken and soak in 5 gallons of water mixed with one cup of lye for at least 24 hours, making sure the neck and head of the chicken are draped over the side of the pot to vent properly.

3. Drain, rinse and dry the chicken.  At this point the feathers should have formed a fused  bed underneath the meat. Carefully peel back the feather bed from the chicken and discard some distance from any habitation.  The chicken should be tender and malleable at this point, translucent with a gelatinous consistency.

4. Soak the groats until tender. Soak the dry cured chicken livers until al dente and then grind finely along with the rock salt and chopped baitfish.

5. Drain the groats, put them into a large mixing bowl and add badger fat, celery root, sun-dried beet, kohlrabi, onion grass, juniper berries, hot paprika and devil’s parsley. Stir in the chicken liver mixture. Beat until the mixture is slightly glutinous. Stir in the goat or squirrel broth.

6. Force the chicken through a sieve into the groat mixture, taking care not to put your face or hands directly over the bowl.

7. Cover the bowl with wire mesh and a damp cloth and allow to ferment outside for about 1 hour.

8. Stir and pour into a large dutch oven.  Cook in a 325 degree oven for about 3 hours. If the Scrawlish dries out DO NOT add water! Discard immediately. Either start over or lead a Christian life.***

9. At this point the Chicken Scrawlish can be served as a stew, the so-called White Scrawlish.  It is customarily served on a bed of boiled nettles as a late supper after the men have returned home drunk.   

But typically, much larger amounts of Chicken Scrawlish were made and some of the scrawlish was “put up” in loaves.

For Chicken Scrawlish Loaf, or Black Scrawlish

10. Let the Scrawlish settle and then pour off as much of the top fluid as possible.

11. Turn the Scrawlish out onto a floured board and knead for about 20 minutes, alternately adding the Hyssop vinegar and Woodruff jam, until it is elastic and not too lumpy.  At this point the Scrawlish dough should be unpleasant to look at and touch. You can’t really get used to it. Form into a roughly loaf-shaped mass and place on a baking sheet you intend to discard afterwards.  Bake at 275 degrees for 12 hours in a very well-ventilated room.

12. Remove and allow the loaf to cool completely.  The loaf will keep indefinitely. Loaves were often passed down from generation to generation.

Serves all or none

Nutritional information: unknown.

To conclude, as the dish migrated down from the Carpathians into the plains and cities of Hungary, it was considerably tamed.  However, it retained its air of mystery as a “special” dish, and throughout most the 19th century the eating of it was considered a venal sin.

*To spatchcock a fowl: Place the bird breast side down on as clean a surface as you can find. Using a very sharp knife cut from the neck to the tail end along both sides of the backbone to remove. This takes some force. Make a small slit in the cartilage at the bottom end of the breast bone, then with both hands placed on the rib cage, crack open the bird by opening it, like a book, towards the cutting surface.  This will reveal the keel bone. Run you fingers up along wither side of the cartilage in between in between the breasts to loosen it from the flesh, then grab the keel bone and pull it up to remove it, along with the attached cartilage.  Flip over and smooth the skin.  The bird is now spatchcocked.

**Although a three day ride is sufficient for an authentic Chicken Scrawlish, Scrawlishes were often distinguished and rated by the length of time continuously “saddled.” In addition to this recipe of Three Day Scrawlish, there was Five Day Scrawlish, Eight Day Scrawlish, and for special occasions, Campaign Scrawlish, where the chicken was “saddled” for an entire military campaign or until the rider returned home.  This Scrawlish was also called “Funeral Scrawlish” or “Missing Limb Scrawlish.”

*** The exact meaning of this sentence in the original is in dispute. The original recipe continues: “Immediately start a novena for protection against the Unclean One. And spit thrice upon leaving or entering the house for the following week.” 

Snark: The New Poetry Month Poster

So the American Academy of Poets has announced the release of this year's Poetry Month poster. 

And it's a snoozer. 

As the official press release describes it:

"Red letters set in flight to spell "National Poetry Month" are the centerpiece of this bold poster. The image is anchored by two cupped hands."

"this bold poster"   

Really?

Yeah.  This is pretty bold. 

Bold like the "Got Milk" posters are bold.  Bold like the Dakota Fanning says READ posters.  Actually, the Dakota Fanning poster is more interesting than this job.  Dakota Fanning is at least an interesting person holding up Charlotte's Web and maybe someone out there in the target audience might think, "Wow, if the girl from "Man on Fire" and "War of the Worlds" is into Charlotte's Web, it might be a good read." 

I won't even get into the absolute lack of imagination on font-choice on this thing.  Let's just consider its express purpose:

How the hell does this inspire someone to go pick up a book of poetry?  How the hell does this inspire someone to go hear poetry for that matter.  Seriously.  This is the tamest, least imaginative advert I've seen in a while.  I can only imagine that deference for the lowest common-denominator, least offensive, middling banality was the call since these posters are going to be on the bulletin boards of classrooms across America.  But seriously, is this the best they could come up with?  This was the work of the folks at "SpotCo", who the press release bills as:

[the] New York City agency responsible for the lion’s share of poster designs for Broadway’s most popular shows. These include RENT, Chicago, and Avenue Q.

I can only imagine ticket sales for "NATIONAL POETRY MONTH" if this were the poster.  I'm thinking a very very limited run.

Aesthetically it's such a boring piece of work. 

This doesn't have to be.  The American Academy has done great work before.  Consider last year's poster with a really clever pixilated Whitman.  It was both classy and cutting edge.  Certainly more interesting then the flyaway letters of this year's effort.

What does this year's poster look like to you?

Here are my ideas:

• Help!  My letters are floating away!!
• Please sir.  Can I have some more red letters?
• Dismembered hands profit from the Poetry Foundation's novel program of sprinkling letters from zeppelins flying over the city.

Dissing Poetry Again...

I've made a decision to pretty much leave any comment on the political campaigns to my own personal blog.  Figured my work on other blogs (rare are it is) should be focused.  So I blog about poetry here.

But I have to say this morning's column by E.J. Dionne alerted me to the recurring belittling of poetry.

Yesterday Hillary Clinton said:

"You campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose."

Ugh.   Perhaps this sentiment is not surprising coming from the candidate with a real lack of poetic articulation.

But what does this mean anyway?  That you govern in the closed single layer?  I'm trying to think of how such a flippant (and stupid) comment like this plays out.  So no prosody in governance. And if one has very little poetry in one's campaign (ahem.. Hillary) what does that leave for your governance?

The whole thing is just another irritating note.

Split This Rock in March!

NEW! Call for Poetry Films -  January 30 Deadline: Seeking artistic, experimental, and challenging interpretations of poetry that explore critical social issues. Films up to 15 minutes. Entry fee: $15. Selected films and videos will be screened during the festival's film program. For full guidelines and required entry form: http://splitthisrock.org/film.html

Panel Proposals - Deadline Extended to January 1: Split this Rock invites proposals for panel discussions and workshops on a range of topics at the intersection of poetry and social change. Possibilities are endless. Challenge us. Let's talk about craft, let's talk about mentoring young poets, let's talk about working in prisons, connecting with the activist community, sustaining ourselves in dark times, the role of poetry in wartime. Deadline extended to January 1, 2008. Download the form here: http://splitthisrock.org/documents/Call-for-Proposals.doc

Poetry Contest - January 15 Deadline: The contest benefits Split This Rock Poetry Festival. $1,000 awarded for poems of provocation & witness; Kyle G. Dargan will judge. $500 for 1st, $300 for 2^nd, and $200 for 3rd place. 1st place winner will read the winning poem at the festival. The poem will also be published on the festival website at www.SplitThisRock.org. All winners receive free festival admission. $20 entry fee benefits the festival. Postmark Deadline: January 15, 2008. Guidelines for entry: http://splitthisrock.org/contests.html.

Support Split This Rock, the historic gathering of activist poets: The CrossCurrents Foundation made a challenge grant of $10,000 to Split This Rock last month. They'll match every dollar you give. We're 25% of the way to meeting the match � double your donation by giving today! Every dollar you give is tax-deductible through our fiscal sponsor, the Institute for Policy Studies. Just click here: https://secure.democracyinaction.org/dia/organizations/IPS/shop/custom.jsp?donate_page_KEY=1120 and be sure to designate "Split This Rock" as the project you'd like to support. Or send a check payable to "IPS/Split This Rock" to: IPS, 1112 16^th Street, NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC  20036.

Many thanks! Your contribution will make a tremendous difference.

Remembering poet Ann Darr - Grace Cavalieri

Ann Darr, poet and teacher, World War II pilot, circus member, and author of nine books of poetry has passed away.

She was the author of Confessions of a Skewed Romantic, The Myth of a Woman's Fist, Do You Take This Woman, Flying the Zuni Mountains , Riding with the Fireworks, and Cleared for Landing.  She also edited Hungry As We Are, An Anthology of Washington Area Poets.

She also taught countless students at American University and at the Writers Center in Bethesda.

The Washington Post had a fine obituary earlier this week.[link] It quoted Darr as once writing:

"The poems I write and read help me to handle the feelings that would otherwise shred me," she once told an interviewer. "Poetry may not have saved my life, but I can't imagine a life without it."

There have also been many great postings online about her passing.  E. Ethelbert Miller has posted the family's press release about her death on his blog.[link]

Merrill Leffler has created a Tribute page to Darr on the Dryad Press site. [link]

We asked Grace Cavalieri, who was a good friend and one of Darr's publishers, if she would share a few words about Darr.  I believe they provide a wonderful portrait of this amazing poet:

This may sound strange, but I am not so afraid of death now, with Annie over there. It will be more like life itself -- her exasperation, her flashing blue eyes, her trembling love, indignation, loyalty, temper, passion, inspiration, yearning.  It will make the hereafter worth the trouble. She will, of course, have a beau at her side because Ann was a 20th century beauty in the style of our silver screen heroines. And men could not stay away. I never knew her when there was no one in love with her. She told poet Lisa Ritchie "one should always look her best, as if she were about to go on stage." The last time I saw her, maybe five years ago, she was in satin and brocade at poet Robert Sargent’s birthday party...he is now gone as well...she said “Grace, I had to give up teaching as I cannot remember my students' names." She had a retired Air Force Colonel at her side that day, proud to be her companion.

My remembrances of Ann Darr hark to the 70’s when I was just beginning to give public readings. She was already a nationally known figure, and I look back, humbled by her unflinching support and loyalty. I cannot remember any reading I gave where Ann was not in the front row. She understood my craziness and took it for art...something she could relate to...for she was a risk taker on the page and in life, and held nothing back. She did not mind when I went over the edge. She’d been there and back.

I have recordings of her from "The Poet and the Poem," several from the last 30 years, now archived at GWU library and Pacifica, ...and to listen is to know that there is no one else in the world that can read her poetry -- a tremulous voice, a beautiful broadcast vibrato; the soul and intensity in each word knocked my breath away, and always will.

My publishing house, The Bunny and the Crocodile Press, published two of Ann’s books, Confessions of a Skewed Romantic and Flying the Zuni Mountains.  Her famous pilot-photo graces the cover of Zuni, designed by my daughter, Cindy Cavalieri;  and Ann’s daughter designed the cover art for Skewed. Working with Ann was like being a teenager again at a sleepover trying out different color nail polishes. We met when we could. I was at St. Mary’s College every May for 28 years and Ann was a frequent guest poet. One May we put together the proof of Zuni Mountains in between teaching workshops and poetry readings. How I miss the chemistry we had together; she must have been in her sixties then. We were girlfriends, compatriots, and bonded in trust, putting together her books with only scraps of time between us...sitting in a dorm at St. Mary’s College with papers and pages covering the floor, then back to DC …and then a session in my condo before we went to see plays at Arena Stage... then doing the finals in my daughter’s kitchen...putting together her books, making something permanent...publishing on the run...poetry on the fly.

We had everything in common-- writing, daughters, and flying machines. Because my husband, Ken Flynn, was a Navy Pilot, our relationship was multidimensional. Only he knew exactly what her flying experiences entailed, the subtext of thrill and terror. Ann and I talked poetry, literary gossip; Ken and Ann talked technical maneuvers and detail missions. She cooked for us, we cooked for her. I never felt anything but comfort in her presence. I knew I was totally accepted. Who would want that to go away? Where can I find that now?

The fuel for Ann’s life was love and rage, in equal parts. I see her bristling at any injustice. I see her poems clinging to the brilliant absurdities and riding them out. She has a book called Riding with the Fireworks. That is her epitaph, blazing and moving. When Reuben Jackson heard of her death, he said “Fly- pilot – Fly.”  How perfect that we all remember her in motion, as a triumph of energy, as an exertion of power.

Grace Cavalieri

ANN DARR Online

E. Ethelbert Miller has the family's original press release about Darr's death.

Merrill Leffler and Dryad Press, which published Darr's Cleared for Landing Poems by a WWII female pilot in 1978 have posted a loving tribute to Ann Darr on their website at http://www.dryadpress.com/AnnDarr.htm

"We note with sadness the passing of Ann Darr, a prominent DC poet.  Dryad Press has started an 'In Memoriam' page on their website that is terrific.  The link reprints poems, and gives biographical information.

Darr's Writing online:

"At Sixteen"

"Relative Matter" (Dryad Press site)

The Long Flight Home (on Women at War)

Audio

Ann Darr on her Poetry on PRI's Radio Dialogue
1994 Interview with George Liston Seay

Michael Lally on Ann Darr

The Washington Post has a great obituary by Patricia Sullivan online [link].

 

Poets on the Road - In Frost's House

So the fere and I are on week two of a delightful trip up north.  We spent a night at Robert Frost's old house in Shaftsbury, Vermont (honestly, I'm not bragging here <grin>) and had a great poetic experience reading some of his poetry in his old living room.  The house is now part of a larger privately owned complex that includes his old main house and his writing studio on these rolling meadows with ponds and great pine trees and birches.

Our last morning there Pete and I sat in various parts of the house reading poems by Howard Nemerov & James Hayford about Frost.  Hayford was a native Vermonter who studied with Frost at Amherst.  I'd stumbled across an autographed copy of his Star In The Shed Window: Collected Poems the day before at Northshire Books in Manchester (which is a book mecca for anyone in the area!!).  Hayford, who died in 1993, wrote much of his poems in meter and we really enjoyed reading his work on the road and sitting there in Frost's house with a beautiful view of his studio through the window.

Frost at Bread Loaf

Already in himself a force of Nature,
The white-maned mountain lion of a poet
Who's had the queer luck to be lionized
Advances as a cloud across the landscape
To win another conversation with
the college poetry establishment.

Of Nemerov's work we read his "For Robert Frost, in the Autumn, in Vermont" with the great lines:

All on the mountains, as on tapestries
Reversed, their threads unreadable though clear,
The leaves turn in the volume of the year.
Your land becomes more brilliant as it dies.

Readers of my personal blog know I've been on a Nemerov jag of late since discovering his collected poems on the Chesapeake a few weeks back.  Finding this present voice speaking to me on this trip was a delight.  Interestingly enough, the current owners of the Robert Frost house, have a framed piece in the entryway that's based largely on Nemerov's stunning "The Painter Dreaming In The Scholar's House."  So we had to read this poem written for Paul Klee and Paul Feeley aloud in its complete form.  A few selections:

For such a man, art is an act of faith:
Prayer the study of it, as Blake says,
And praise the practice; nor does he divide
Making from teaching, or from theory.
The three are one, and in his hours of art
There shines a happiness through darkest themes,
As though spirit and sense were not at odds.

and

That there should be much goodness in the world,
Much kindness and intelligence, candor and charm,
And that it all goes down in the dust after a while,
This is a subject for the steadiest meditations
Of the heart and mind, as for the tears
That clarify the eye toward charity.

So may it be to all of us, that at some times
In this bad time when faith in study seems to fail,
And when impatience in the street and still despair at home
Divide the mind to rule it, there shall some comfort come
From the remembrance of so deep and clear a life as his.

Beautiful work.

We ended our on-site reading spree with some prose.  Donald Hall wrote about Robert Frost in his Remembering Poets: Reminiscences And Opinions.  Hall met Frost at Breadloaf when he was sixteen years old(!!).   He last saw Frost a few months before his death.  In between there were his interactions with Frost as a graduate student at Stanford and later an editor and then a professor at Michigan where Frost was visiting.  These experiences give Hall a unique view of Frost in various settings and periods in his long life.  Hall considers the biographies that have made Frost into a monster too one-dimensional.  Hall believes that Frost was at essence a man who was racked with guilt his entire life for the destitution, misery and suicide that plagued his family.  What Hall presents (seems) to be an even-handed estimation of the great American poet.  It's also at times really funny and even gossipy. 

We both loved reading it in the old Frost house because it seemed so fitting.  Hall's multi-part essay on Frost is titled, "Vanity, Fame, Love, and Robert Frost."  As we read we would pause to read the Frost poems Hall would mention.  These included "To Earthward," "Home Burial," "After Apple Picking" and "Death of the Hired Man" and the haunting "Out, Out--."  The writing is intensely personal and reveals the way Frost changed in his eyes.

"Fame is a word for the love that everyone wants, impersonal love, love from strangers for what we are, what we do or make.  People write poems when they are ten so that their mothers will love them; when they are sixteen so that their peers will love them; when they are thirty (and eighty-eight) so that the muse will love them, and ages to come, and all men and women, universally, forever and ever, as long as the language exists and maybe longer."

and later on his last visit with Frost a few months before his death:

"So his talk went, in June of 1962, with this strange and happy audience.  And all the time, as I sat listening and relaxed, I was aware that I would almost certainly never see him again, aware that this eighty-eight-year-old complexity, that i had seen walk out of the ground when I was sixteen, that I had admired, despised, feared and loved--would go in to the ground forever, before I could see him again.  I could almost look ahead to a morning next winter, when we turned on the radio at breakfast and heard that Robert Frost had died in Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston.  And I could feel the loss as I would not have felt it a year earlier.  I would feel--after so many years of fear and defense--that I had lost a model of survival, endurance: a model you need not so much at sixteen as at thirty-five."     From Donald Hall's Remembering Poets.