Last weekend Alan and I gave a reading to the Powow River Poets in Newburyport, Massachusetts. Commenting on the regional heritage, Alan read three little poems that converse with Robert Frost. They charmed our audience of New England poetry enthusiasts, for whom Frost is a presence in every season.
Rightly understood, the poet’s task is to converse not just with his readers but with his predecessors � the illustrious dead, all the way back to Homer. Imitation and parody afford young poets valuable training. At their best, the recently published juvenilia of Auden are perfect copies of Thomas Hardy. But mature poets sometimes indulge in mimesis as well. Wilbur’s ‘To W.H. Auden’ so resembles a late Auden poem it is hard to believe that Wilbur wrote it. Wilbur’s ‘April 5, 1974′ is so Frostian that he nearly decided not to publish it. Robert Francis has been unjustly ignored because of critical misperceptions that he was a Frost imitator. My own verses about derelict farms and orchards necessarily converse with the Master as well.
Today I’d like rare readers to meet New Englander Robert Crawford. His first book, Too Much Explanation Can Ruin a Man, was recently published by David Roberts Books. Crawford is 46, and he used to work “in and around the Pentagon.” These days he teaches poetry in quiet Chester, New Hampshire.
The Road Agent
She stopped me just inside the door so I
Would know some news for me that couldn’t wait:
“Just met a man you know � a Clarence Ward.
I was looking out the window when he knocked.
I was waiting on the flowers for the table,
For you to cross the field. It startled me.”
“Strange hour for a visit. What brought him by?”
“He wants our vote for road agent this time.”
“Well, it is the only job worth having here.”
“Don’t start. You like it here. Let me go on.
I didn’t want to leave the window for the door
And must have had a frown when he began,
Because he took a step back off the porch,
And put his thumbs in his overalls, like this.”
She did a perfect imitation of
The man whose farm is out on Fremont Road.
“He ended up too far away to part
With flyers on the things he’d do for less;
Just started in: ‘Hello, my name is Clarence Ward
And I’d like to be the road agent again.’
Said he ‘knows the importance of a road done right.’
Truth is, I do believe he is sincere.”
It was something about the way I know she turns
And keeps her head when the story isn’t over.
“And that was all?”
“I wish it was the end,
But the way he stood, and that earnest voice of his
So full of this concern for cracks and holes.
It may have been the way the light was falling
Behind him in the street, I just don’t know...
It made me laugh.”
”You laughed at him out loud?”
And all I could think of was her laugh and how,
On some days, you know, of all the loves,
Why this one.
She took the flowers from my hand.
“If you see Clarence, tell him I meant no harm.”
In its conversational blank verse, its easy blend of narrative and dialogue, and in its setting, this fine poem cannot help but remind one of ‘The Death of the Hired Man,’ ‘Home Burial,’ and many other Frost poems. Curiously, it was written before Crawford made serious study of Frost. It has none of the grimness of the aforementioned masterpieces, and it is the work of a man in love with a woman, as are so many of Crawford’s most affecting poems.
It’s said that death and love are the two great subjects of poetry. Frost was “one acquainted with the night” and thought more of death or love gone wrong. Crawford is predominantly a love poet. His sunny disposition illumines poems like ‘French Braids’ and ‘To Unlearn Love.’ I read his book on the 900 foot-long veranda of the Mount Washington Hotel at Bretton Woods, a perfect setting for New England poetry. When I encountered the following poem I passed it to Alan and asked ‘What famous work does this exactly follow in stanza and rhyme scheme?’
An Abandoned Garden
By August I noticed the lack of care,
And now in September I feel the despair;
The rusting tools, the vanished rows,
Reveal an all too brief affair.
The hopeful beginning has come to a close
As a meeting place for sinister crows
And devious weeds planning for when
They’ll make this a plot where anything goes.
What kind of errant husbandman
Would let it fall to field again?
I think I know, I’ve met a few:
A fine egalitarian.
The type of man, a touch askew,
Who holds the universal view,
“To everything, a heart be true,”
But saves desertion just for you.
The answer is ‘Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening,’ and it’s a damned tricky form to duplicate. But the tone of Crawford’s poem is so different that my question stumped Alan, or else that second glass of wine had clouded his wits. The only obvious clue for the casual listener is the phrase “I think I know.” Like the Master, Crawford is politically conservative, and here he uses a Frostian scene of dilapidation and decay to take a swipe at self-congratulatory hypocrisy.
I love to hear a sonnet tell a story, to reach beyond the bounds of the lyric. I attempt this in many of my own sonnets, and so does Crawford. Here’s a poem about silent Cal Coolidge that won the Eratosphere’s annual Sonnet Bakeoff, even though the contest was judged by a Texas Democrat. Too many heartfelt lyric outbursts require padding to fill out the requisite fourteen lines. To tell a story within the confines of a sonnet requires extreme compression, a judicious selection of only those details that advance the narrative. I think this is one of the best sonnets I’ve read in a long time, and I read hundreds of them every year.
The Swearing-in of Calvin Coolidge
Plymouth Notch, Vermont, 1923
Strange, the postman’s loud, insistent knock
(The nearest phone, in town, two miles away)
Which roused them out of bed at one o’clock,
Tired from bringing in the August hay.
And stranger still, two telegrams they read
By lantern light: official ones, and both
With urgent news from Washington, that said,
“The President is dead. Please take the oath.”
But in Vermont, where even summer skies
Can whisper that it’s time to stack the wood,
And every breath on northern air implies
'You’re running out of days to do some good'
No one would be surprised, or think it odd
To see a man look up and say “So help me God.”
There are so many things to like about this poem, from the recollection of the Vice President of the United States helping his father bring in the hay to the stunning sestet which draws its power from the humility and sense of proportion that once characterized America’s national culture. In recent months I’ve praised Deborah Warren, Alfred Nicol, and Rhina Espaillat, all of whom I’ve reviewed for this series of essays. Like Robert Frost, these people draw their strength from their setting, to which they have come by various routes, seemingly by chance. It was a privilege for me to travel rugged New England with the best of their verses whispering in my ear.
–Timothy Murphy (& the EfH)
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