[Tim Murphy]

Deborah Warren, who served this community for years as Moderator of Metrical Poetry, is truly one of Robert Frost's gifted grand daughters. Like so many smashingly good poets at the Sphere, she devoted herself to verse 'in mezzo camin'. She is writing to us about her relationship as a New Englander to the Master. By way of reintroducing you to Deborah, here is the chapter from Requited that I wrote about her.

Twice in my peregrinations as performing poet, I have driven from Amherst to Newburyport. I began those journeys a stone’s throw from Emily Dickinson’s house and ended two miles from the Atlantic, dining on lamb shanks with Rhina, whose hospitality surpasses Ms. D’s reclusiveness. If you should pass that way, don’t make for the turnpike. Take US 202. Northeast of Amherst, this shoulderless two-lane road meanders amid forested hills and rounds reservoirs. Mind the ‘Moose Crossings.’ On the other side of the continent, my friends the Millers once had a 54 car unitrain derailed near the continental divide. A bull moose charged a locomotive and spilled 10 million pounds of number 2 yellow corn some 17000 miles short of the intended destination in China. Cleanup was complicated when a grizzly took possession of what was left of the moose.

American poetry is largely the possession of New Englanders. We have Dickinson, Robinson, Frost, Stevens, Francis and Wilbur, just to name my six favorite American poets in the order of their births. To this day, it seems that half of the country’s emerging poetic talent is locatable in a sixty mile radius of Newburyport, Massachusetts. One of the most accomplished Powows is Deborah Warren. To place her in context, consider E.A. Robinson.

New England

Here where the wind is always north-north-east
And children learn to walk on frozen toes,
Wonder begets an envy of all those
Who boil elsewhere with such a lyric yeast
Of love that you will hear them at a feast
Where demons would appeal for some repose,
Still clamoring where the chalice overflows
And crying wildest who have drunk the least.
Passion is here a soilure of the wits,
We’re told, and Love a cross for them to bear;
Joy shivers in the corner where she knits
And Conscience always has the rocking-chair,
Cheerful as when she tortured into fits
The first cat that was ever killed by Care.

Robinson is toying with us all the way through this poem, beginning with a weather quip—though he never felt the nip of North Dakota’s north-northwest—and concluding with a killer sestet that slinks sinuously toward its close, then pounces. He chooses a form notorious for its constriction, the Italian sonnet, but we laugh with him as those limitations liberate his imagination.

Limitation comes very naturally to the New England mind. Hoping to farm, the settlers of New England cleared forests only to find soil so stony that they had no choice but to build (and mend) walls. They also found growing seasons so short that only the most vigilant and vigorous sower could hope for a crop. Harsh life and harsh religion marked the people who lived there. They made virtue of their necessities—a virtue Warren celebrates in ‘Thrift Shop,’ where she delightedly discovers “seven nightgowns with their nap/ still blooming on the flannel.”
‘Thrift Shop’ makes me think of Thoreau, and of the poet Robert Francis, who incorporated account books in his memoir, to celebrate his poverty precisely. Even when New Englanders escaped the exigencies of life on land or at sea, poverty’s mark remained for generations—narrowing the lives and minds of those Beacon Hill ladies in the Robinson poem. But life is less harsh in Howard Dean’s New England. Deborah Warren’s dairy operation is a labor of love, not the sole source of sustenence for her large family. In the title poem of her first book, The Size of Happiness, she dreams of running a 150 cow dairy, of buying up and plowing the surrounding mountains, but as a farmer she has the wisdom to concentrate on what is rewarding—and profitable—breeding stock.

The Heifers

The three-week heifers straggle down
the ramp this April Saturday,
out to a small enclosure where
they won’t get very far away.
On Thursday—even Wednesday—though,
we’ll wander over here again;
their bellies will be deeper,
and their faces will be longer then.
A different slant of haunch or brow:
They won’t still be these heifers, who
will get away from us inside
the small space of a day or two.

Eastern North Dakota is cropland too fine for pasture. I have only one friend in the dairy business, only a few in cattle-rearing. However I have been privileged to watch new-born calves, and I envy the precision of observation Deborah brings to this poem. “A different slant” tips her invisible hat to Ms. D. But 'bellies deeper, faces longer?' Dickinson couldn’t have conjured those images. It is the work of a woman who has mastered mothering, and who knows the changes that come over calves and children. She also knows that plowing a mountain slope is masculine folly, and she tells us so in one of my favorite poems from her second book, Zero Meridian.

Hay Field on Methodist Hill

From the time we cleared it, all it’s been is trouble,
stubborn and recalcitrant and proud;
every winter, fractious and uncowed,
throwing up new rocks and glacier-rubble:
It’s clear it never wanted to be plowed.

And once we got the stones out, it was trees
behaving as if they had the right of way:
Every March the maples have a field day—
don’t expect them to give you a year of peace—
shoving, off-side, elbowing out the hay.

When the saplings get above themselves, it’s over.
Let them grow a foot or so too high
and—teen-age trees? You might as well go try
and sow the sea with rocks and hope for clover,
or, if you want less trouble, plow the sky.

There is much to be admired in these pentameter cinquains which borrow the rhyme scheme of ‘The Road Not Taken.’ Though the colloquiality of the speech is one hundred years more current, the poem has much the same wry, edgy spirit as the Robinson I quoted above. I’ve cleared slopes of scrub aspen to plant red and white pine, and I’ve wielded the brush cutter to keep weed trees down—a far easier task than keeping newly-planted clover fit for mowing and baling. I could imagine writing a poem something like this, but I’m not a family man, and I could not have come up with “teen-age trees.” Deborah is both mother and teacher. Her experience with young people has instilled an instinct for setting serious thoughts in colloquial, playful language.

In August 2005 Alan and I visited that picture postcard of a farm. Deborah’s husband George had sold the heifers and leased out the land, but at least those transactions cash flowed the farm. George and I discussed the vicissitudes of agriculture. He was an admirer of Set the Ploughshare Deep, my prior prosimetrum in which I chronicled the building and collapse of my first farming venture. Deborah and George had suffered a tragedy last year when their son Nicholas fell from a tree in New Zealand. He suffered a serious head injury and was in a coma for six months. That he is now in rehab back in Boston is something of a miracle. I wrote him a poem that relies on the old mnemonic used to teach boys how to tie a bowline, “the rabbit comes up the hole, hops round the tree, and back down the hole.” The story is true.

The Bowline
For Nicholas

A young sailor plummeted from a tree.
Stunned as though a spreader had cracked his head,
he lay six months unmoving, nearly dead.
To rouse him from insensibility
a wise doctor gave him a length of rope,
said “Bowline.” The rabbit popped up the hole,
and hopped counter-clockwise around the bole.
Prayers had been heard, a mooring made for hope.

[Catherine Chandler]

Deborah Warren is one of my favorite poets writing today. I was fortunate to meet her in 2006 on a visit to Newburyport. A comment she and Rhina made at dinner, and my later learning of her son's accident, inspired me to write the sonnet, "Vermont Passage", which I dedicated to her and which was subsequently published in Mezzo Cammin. I encourage everyone to read her wonderful poems.

[Tim Murphy]

Cathy, please paste your poem into this thread by way of welcoming Deborah. It's all open mic, all the time, on this board. Caution, she has decided which poem of hers and which of Frost's she will write on, but when she will arrive at the party I don't know.

[Catherine Chandler]

Sure, Tim, here it is:

Vermont Passage

For Deborah Warren

Wildflowers thrive and form, in mid-July,
a buoyant blue and gold receiving line
the length of Interstate Route 89,
as if to welcome friends and passersby.
But high up in the hillside meadow teems
a purple floret whose divine perfume
makes one forget that roses are in bloom--
mellifluous, the stuff of summer dreams.
And when Vermont’s Green Mountains turn to white,
when northern folk see little of the sun,
before the sugar maple sap can run,
when better days attend each bitter night,
I breathe in honeyed memories of clover,
and winter, for a while at least, is over.

[Golias]

What a wonderful sonnet, Cathy!

Tim, that's a mighty fine re-introduction for Deborah. Whether she arrives soon or later on, we shall all be delighted she's back again.

G/W

[Tim Murphy]

I agree, Wiley. Cathy, it reminds me of the end of Wilbur's April 5, 1974, which we shall be discussing when Alan and I simulcast from Cummington on July 10:

As when a set mind, blessed by doubt,
Relaxes into mother-wit.
Flowers, I said, will come of it.

We are all Frost's prosodic and spiritual grandchildren or great-grandchildren. Necessarily, there are a great many threads in this celebration. Stephen Collington has just posted a marvelous poem on our Open Mic, a poem for his aging father. My relationship with Frost is inextricably bound by my relationship with Dad, who could recite Frost until the cows came home. I reiterate my thanks to everyone participating in this celebration of an American original.

[Rose Kelleher]

Limitation comes very naturally to the New England mind.

Never thought of that. I'm from MA, and my first instinct is to say, well, that sounds more like a Puritan thing than a New England thing. And yet, before I even start typing, I remember that yesterday, long before reading this thread, I posted a couple of cinquains about "the art of holding back" over in Drills and Amusements. Ha! Nice intro, looking forward to DW's essay.

[Michael Juster]

The greatest joy of my extremely brief time as an academic was hosting Rhina Espaillat and Deborah Warren together as guest poets in my class. Either one of them alone would have been wonderful--together they played off each other in a kind and amazing way that floored a tough crowd.

[Catherine Chandler]

Does anyone know when Deborah's new book will be available for order on Amazon?

[Tim Murphy]

Bumping up for review.