[Richard Wakefield]

I don’t know whether I could have learned what Robert Frost taught me from anyone but Frost. There is in him a confluence of form and subject that flows into my own experience as a reader and outside of books as well. If anyone accuses me of having been too strongly influenced by him, or being merely a very minor branch of his great river, I won’t argue. I grew up hearing, reading, and reciting formal poetry, from Longfellow to Kipling (I’ll leave to others to decide whether that’s a wide or a narrow range), but in Frost I found not only the music of formal verse but also the subject matter with which I had, really, a fairly brief but formative encounter: the fading rural life, the ruined and nearly ruined farms where people had hoped and labored only to be displaced by forces natural and market beyond their control or even their comprehension.

Frost says somewhere that when he reads an unfamiliar poem he begins by scanning the right margin: What happens at the ends of lines? When I first ran into that comment I resisted it. The romantic in me wanted to be able to plunge into a poem and let it happen spontaneously. But in time I recognized that if poetry is to be a performance, whether in its creation by the writer or in the reading of it by the audience, then a little preparation is no more out of place than it is for a musician about to play a new piece of music. After all, I was taught to look over a new sonata before I attempted to play it – look at the phrasing, the modulations, the ornaments, the dynamics. Why not do the same with a poem?

Here’s a lesser known poem of Frost’s that seems to me a wonderful example of craft at its best, and a glance down the right margin reveals a great deal:

The Investment

Over back where they speak of life as staying
(“You couldn’t call it living, for it ain’t”),
There was an old, old house renewed with paint,
And in it a piano loudly playing.

Out in the plowed ground in the cold a digger,
Among unearthed potatoes standing still,
Was counting winter dinners, one a hill,
With half an ear to the piano’s vigor.

All that piano and new paint back there,
Was it some money suddenly come into?
Or some extravagance young love had been to?
Or old love on an impulse not to care –

Not to sink under being man and wife,
But get some color and music out of life?

Frost does just about everything you can do at the end of a line, including nothing. At the end of the third stanza he even extravagantly breaks the boundary he established for himself in the first two stanzas when he doesn’t conclude but instead runs his sentence across the stanza break. Then there’s the play between masculine and feminine rhymes, which seems to my sexist ear to mimic the wordless conversation between the man and woman as he works the potato field and she plays the piano, each fully aware of the other.

Of course there’s much else, such as the lovely sounds of “out in the plowed ground” and “counting winter dinners.” There’s the one fancy word, “extravagance,” perfect in context and itself extravagant.

My sonnet “Brambles” takes up the scene later, perhaps not very much later. I dare not claim to approach Frost’s craftsmanship, but I won’t apologize for trying.

Brambles

A stand of brambles flanks the unused road
with here and there a fenceline showing through.
The field beyond is yellow, long unmowed,
and gone to tansy, thistle, and meadow rue.
Across the field the vines like tangled yarn
have nearly reached the cabin’s chimney top.
Another tangle marks the fallen barn,
the only sign a rotted rafter prop.
The fence, the field, the house, the barn – undone
by brambles, tansy, thistle, rue, and vines
that no one planted, no one reaps; they run
unchecked and heedless to their dark designs.
As if they haven’t done sufficient harm
they leave a mocking outline of the farm.

Richard Wakefield

[Tim Murphy]

Thanks for a far closer reading of The Investment than I ever gave it, Richard; but you’re a Frost expert, not I. I actually think your sonnet is a lot better, and it belongs on my Forsaken Farmstead thread. Your tangle of tansy, vines, thistle, rue, and brambles is a sonic tangle, that sound of sense that Frost was always after. The alliterations, such as “the farm, the field,” or “rotted rafter” are delightful. Your easy simile, “vines like tangled yarn,” gives away your whole program, which is the same as Frost’s or mine, to invest this evidence of human failure, with metaphoric depth. You even playfully tip your hat to the master with “dark designs,” if design matter in a thing so small as a sonnet. Well, of course it does, and yours is beautifully designed and executed with an apparent artlessness. One of my favorite Wakefield poems.

In my observations on Big RF, I shall occasionally allude to little rf, Robert Francis:

Return

This little house shows the degrees
By which wood can return to trees.

Weather has stained the shingles dark
And indistinguishable from bark.

Lichen that long ago adjourned
Its lodging here has now returned.

And if you look in through the door
You see a sapling through the floor.

I regard Francis as Alicia regards Housman, “a major minor poet,” in her funny phrase. But he was ignored all his life, unjustly, for being derivative of his neighbor and senior poet. I don’t find him derivative at all, except perhaps in the blank verse of his novella, Valhalla, which is altogether blacker than Frost’s blank verse narratives. Here Francis undertakes something a little trickier than metaphor, and that is metamorphosis. Really a perfect little poem. Francis has a zen way of seeing into and behind things, even of seeing them upside down like a nuthatch, as Wilbur asserted in his intro to rf's Butter Hill. It is distinctly his own, and he deserves to be more widely read.


[This message has been edited by Tim Murphy (edited June 18, 2008).]

[Richard Wakefield]

That little Francis poem is a chiller, one I had forgotten. It has echoes in Frost's "The Black Cottage," although the two poems are very different in overall effect. There's also my little poem "The Turn," which picks up Francis's trope of the outer world invading the inner, although I wasn't aware of any influence. Frost's "The Thatch," another little-discussed gem, uses the trope as well. Maybe the fear of nature's invasive tendencies is so primal that we all reinvent such images independently.
RPW

The Turn

They told me if I went
my heart would break to see the place.
I said, It’s just a ruined farm, its land
leased out, the barn and buildings left to stand
unused; some facts we have to face,
no room for sentiment.

From half a mile or so
the house looked as it had before,
except for here and there a broken pane.
The fields lay newly disked, awaiting rain.
The barn still stood, though swaybacked more
than twenty years ago.

I walked the dusty path
and climbed the steps – then could not pass
the darkened threshhold where the door gaped wide,
the floorboards warped where rain had blown inside.
There in the cracks grew blades of grass
like harvest’s aftermath.

I turned and walked away.
That grass was all I had to see
to know that what our life inside had kept
outside – the rain, the dust, the wind – had crept
across the threshhold after we
were gone – and meant to stay.

[Tim Murphy]

The Turn. Wow! This might be the best poem on Forsaken Farms that I have ever read, better than Francis, better than mine, better even than Frost's. Let me tell you why.

A prosier first sestet I couldn't imagine, the rhythm of unsentimental, logical, common speech, made prosier by the extreme difficulty of the nonce stanza Richard has invented, has wandered his way into in his mind, as he came to this theme. A3,B4,C5,C5,B4,A3. Now unless you've got Tennyson's bugle blowing, this isn't easy for the listener to get his ear around. No rhyme until line 4. Three separate meters. The enveloping A rhymes and stanza closure six lines apart. I am a practiced poet of heterometrical stanzas, and I know that Richard P. Wakefield has been carefully studying what Richard P. Wilbur and I are doing with our stanzas. And my ear doesn't really settle into Richard's song until "harvest's aftermath," where the song becomes devastating in its understated way. Look carefully also at the line endings Frost paid such attention to in Richard's intro above, the lineation, the lay of the sentence in the line, and the risks he is taking in enjambing his sentences across line breaks. Richard, this is the best poem of yours I have ever read.

[Andrew Frisardi]

I love what Frost says about the righthand margin of the poem, and your comments confirm what I often do myself, instinctively, when I read poetry.

Great poems on this thread - thoroughly enjoyed reading them. And I agree about Robert Francis - a poet I adore. I was lucky enough to go to one of his readings when he was really old but still sporting a wide ironic grin. Zen insight indeed, Tim, as in this poem which I'm sure you know:

Waxwings

Four Tao philosophers as cedar waxwings
chat on a February berry bush
in sun, and I am one.

Such merriment and such sobriety--
the small wild fruit on the tall stalk--
was this not always my true style?

Above an elegance of snow, beneath
a silk-blue sky a brotherhood of four
birds. Can you mistake us?

To sun, to feast, and to converse
and all together--for this I have abandoned
all my other lives.

--Robert Francis




[This message has been edited by Andrew Frisardi (edited June 19, 2008).]

[Tim Murphy]

Andrew, thank you for that beautiful poem and that fond recollection. His totem bird is the sandhill crane. I didn't encounter him til I was in my forties, but I payed my respects here:
http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/163.html

[Catherine Chandler]

Richard,

I have always loved "The Investment", perhaps because my paternal grandparents embodied the situation to an extent. I inherited her piano (a Steinway upright grand) which, unfortunately, I left behind in the US when I emigrated to Canada. Anyway, I am going off on a tangent... Of course, my earliest poems were my mother's lullabies, then the nursery rhymes, then the prayers and hymns of my parochial school upbringing. I reveled in all of it and my ear was attuned. In early high school I was introduced to Frost, Hardy, Shakespeare, Longfellow, Wordsworth, etc, etc, and I immediately took to Frost. You guessed it. "Stopping by Woods.." I finally was able to purchase a paperback anthology of his more well-known poems (the Untermeyer edition) and memorized many of the poems in it. What I love about Frost, though, and what has had the greatest impact on my own writing, is his use of everyday language and powerful endings. There are too many of his poems I love to say which is a favorite, but "Reluctance" is one of them.

Catherine Chandler

[Richard Wakefield]

Catherine:
Your personal connection to the poem is striking. Each of us finds a private way into the public utterance of a poem, and I think one of the marks of a great poet is that there are so very many openings.
On another thread there's some talk of what I think of Frost's dialogue poems, often dialogues between a man and a woman, husband and wife. This one is a dialogue without words, but the two strands of the conversation add up to a shared world. The woman's music and man's labor -- neither complete without the other. (Frost isn't naive, of course, and doesn't imagine that a woman's only contribution is music and a man's only contribution labor. In this particular conversation at this particular moment, however, that's what's going on.)
Another of his man-woman dialogues without words is "Never Again Would Birds' Song Be the Same." There too the woman's voice is the music that she has enabled the man to hear in sounds that would otherwise be prosaic.
As a critic I run into many, many poems that seem to offer me no entrance and thus no opportunity to be entranced. I try to leave them for later in hopes that my experience and the poet's will someday overlap enough to let me in. But sometimes, alas, I suspect that the poet takes a perverse pride in excluding all but the select few. Maybe that's just me being defensive, however.
Richard

[Tim Murphy]

Murphy Interviews Wakefield

TIM: In early September of 2000 Ohio University Press sent me a review you had written of Set The Ploughshare Deep. In it you praised my verse, and you singled out for praise the fifth chapter, Tumbleweed, which was my father’s prose recollections of farming in the Twenties and Thirties. It delighted him, and a month later he died. By then I had tracked you down to tell you of our appreciation. You anxiously sent me a bunch of poems, and I liked them so well I responded rather minutely. Do you remember what I thought your weaknesses were?

RPW: I remember that you suggested I was sometimes a slave to the meter, that I should use a little more variation for the sake of expression here and there. I still tend to fall into a pretty regular beat – ba-BUM-ba-BUM-ba-BUM, maybe because I’m afraid people will think any departures are mistakes.

TIM: Soon Alan opened the Deep End for business, and if memory serves me right, you posted about thirty very fine poems for critique; and you were a good reviser. Reflect if you will on the personal utility of the Sphere, not just for you but all those of us who have participated.

RPW: The Sphere has been an education in writing and reading poetry that I couldn’t haven’t gotten anywhere else. While I wouldn’t trade my book learnin’, the passionate give and take on the Sphere brought out poems and critiques I wouldn’t have thought were in me. There were people there (you foremost among them) whom I just didn’t want to disappoint.

TIM: How much periodical publication did you do? How much rejection endure? What were your best venues?

RPW: I sent stuff all over and was fortunate enough to have sufficient acceptances to keep me going. The Formalist was an early and valuable venue, and there were other fine places to publish – Hellas, Iambs & Trochees, various reviews such at Atlanta, Sewanee, Seattle, Tampa… It took me a few tries to get into Light, but getting in there meant a lot to me because at least half of what I write is light verse. Nowadays Light accepts quite a bit of my stuff. In addition, there were lots of very small publications where the editors encouraged me. There’s always lots of rejection, but because I have edited little magazines I know there are all kinds of ways to get rejected that have nothing to do with the quality of the work itself. Still, these days I rarely submit anything without being invited.

TIM: I don’t think I’ve ever told you this, but Cathy called one night. She is your biggest fan, and she was very frustrated that you didn’t have a book. I sort of got on your case. How many times and where did you submit your manuscript before it won the Wilbur Prize?

RPW: I’m lazy and evasive, but my inert nature was no match for both Tim Murphy and Catherine Wakefield. Once the manuscript was put together I was reminded of what Huck says at the end of his book: If I’da knowed what a trouble it is to make a book I never woulda started. I believe we submitted it only to the Wilbur competition. I wasn’t very surprised to be a finalist, but it did surprise me to win.

TIM: I personally think the Wilbur has the best pedigree of any book series I know of. Each volume has added to its luster, and no volume, not even Archaic Smile, towers over such a fine list. Did you know that Tim Steele would be judging your book?

RPW: I have a shelf of the winners and am still a little surprised to see my book among them. I don’t believe I knew at first that Steele would be the judge, but it seems to me a bit of luck that someone who shares some of my sensibilities was in that position.

TIM: The one time I entered the Nemerov contest I did so because Tony Hecht was the judge, and I wanted him to award me that prize. For reasons I won’t go into I can’t imagine a better judge of your work than Tim. If you agree with that assertion, you tell us why.

RPW: As I suggested above, many of my poems are in forms and on subjects that can be found in Steele’s poetry as well and in the poetry of the writers he writes about. There are many passages in my poetry that I’m proud of just as craft, and Steele is certainly the person to appreciate it. But finally one always hopes for a discerning, sensitive reader, and in Tim Steele I got one of the best.

TIM: You no longer post at Deep End, but judging from what I am seeing in, say, Measure, you don’t need to. Reflect on the current state of Richard Wakefield, and tell us how Vertical Mile is coming.

RPW: The Deep End became a little too busy and a little too contentious for me. I didn’t feel I could keep up with the conversation even about other people’s work, and I found too often that things shifted catastrophically away from the purpose of working together as an audience to help a poet. And I also haven’t written much very recently so there’s not much for me to post, and I also feel a little awkward offering criticism over and over without putting up any of my own work for similar treatment.

But now and then I manage a new poem and add it to my “maybe” pile for the next book. Although I really don’t have a lot of ambition to publish another one, there are getting to be a couple of dozen poems that I wouldn’t mind getting out there in some durable form. We’ll see.
Finally, without getting sloppy about it, I have to say that your encouragement has helped me think of myself as a poet, rather than as a guy who write s a poem once in a while. You’ve set high standards and helped me reach them.

TIM: Well, without getting sloppy about it, I knew you were the real deal when I got that first sheaf of poems postmarked from Washington State. One of the distinguishing things about both you and Frost (Francis too, Lord knows), is that you write so well about boyhood. As I told you on the phone, I dropped so much acid at Yale I don’t remember mine. One of the first poems you sent me is Horses, and I would appreciate your concluding this enjoyable conversation by posting it for further discussion. Of course I hope other participants in this forum will pose their own questions to you, Richard.

[Richard Wakefield]

This is a poem that a lot of people like. To me it's an example of how a writer can connect into all kinds of things that he isn't entirely aware of. Looking at the poem now I can see a lot of Frost, of course, some of it in there deliberately and some just because I had absorbed so much of his idiom, but other things as well -- a dimly recalled Greek (?) myth about a horse that forms out of a cloud, various stories I had heard about the homestead years in eastern Oregon, and even the Native American traditional of the Dream Quest.
When Bill Baer worked through the manuscript with me he asked to change the title to "Horses," and I'm happy that I agreed to do so. (And Baer is another person who has been incredibly generous and encouraging.) Here, though, because this forum is about Frost, I restore the original title, an allusion to the title of his first book, "A Boy's Will," which was in turn lifted by RF from a Longfellow poem but that also alluded in Frost's ear to the work of William James, who had an enormous influence on Frost.
(By the way, in this poem I pair "week" with "creek" even though in my mouth they don't rhyme unless I really, really concentrate.)

A Boy’s Work

They sent the boy to build a fire beneath
the steel water trough after a week
of freezing fog had hung a hoary wreath
on every bud and leaf along the creek.
The men were busy at the barn with new
cold-weakened calves. The boy would have to go.
He loaded stove-wood chunks he’d split in two
until the shouldered rucksack bent him low.
In fifty strides the barn was lost – or taken.
He stood confused with cloud, more alone
than in the broad summer fields, forsaken
by or perhaps forsaking the life he’d known.
He staggered along the frozen creek a mile.
He knew the way, but in that cloud it seemed
all unfamiliar; he backtracked twice, and while
he searched, unsure, it was as if he’d dreamed
his life and now awakened cold and lost.
But then the looming rock crib marked his place
to turn, made strange beneath a coat of frost,
and then the pasture trail a wispy trace.
With no more landmarks to help him find his way
he had to kneel as if in prayer to see
if he had kept the trail, until from gray
the trough emerged, a solid certainty.
He found the water solid too, so made
his feeble fire, fed the growing flame,
saw how heat and light rose up and played
against the steel. And then the horses came.
From formless white in single file appeared
the thirsty horses taking living form,
condensed from cloud, more solid as they neared.
He stroked them as they drank and felt them warm
with living heat that he had helped to save.
Their breath plumed up in clouds, more fog unfurled
into the void, and as they drank they gave
a solid, living purpose to his world.

RPW