Visiting Frost: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Robert Frost, edited by Sheila Coghill and Thom Tammaro. University of Iowa Press, 2005; 180 pages; $39.95 hardcover; $17.95 paper

FROM THE DUST JACKET:

A four-time Pulitzer Prize winner whose work is principally associated with the landscape and life in New England, Robert Frost (1874-1963) was a traditional, psychologically complex, often dark and intense poet. In Visiting Frost, 100 homage-paying poets speak on behalf of us whose lives have been brightened by the memorization and recitation of such poems as "The Road Not Taken" or "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." Like Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, Robert Frost looms large in the American literary landscape, straddling the 19th and 20th Centuries like a poetic colossus: whosoever desires passage must, at some point, contend with the monolithic presence of Robert Frost. As they did in Visiting Emily, and Visiting Walt, in Visiting Frost, Sheila Coghill and Thom Tammaro once again capture the conversations between contemporary poets and a legend whose voice endures.

In his introduction to the collection, Frost biographer Jay Parini likens the poet to a "great power station, one who stands off by himself in the big woods, continuously generating electricity that future poets can tap into for the price of a volume of his poems."...In Visiting Frost, 100...poets -- some who knew Frost, most only acquainted through his work -- celebrate and reflect that intensity, in effect tapping into his electrical current.

By reacting to specific Frost poems, by reinventing others, and by remembering aspects of Frost or by quarreling with him, the contributors speak on behalf of us [for whom Frost] -- more than 40 years after his death -- remains in our collective memory.

Frost's poems are still among the most frequently memorized by American schoolchildren, including "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," "Mending Wall," "Birches," "After Apple Picking," "The Pasture," "Fire and Ice," "The Road Not Taken," and "Directive".

Contributors Include Marvin Bell, Wendell Berry, Robert Bly, Gwendolyn Brooks, Hayden Carruth, Peter Davison, Annie Finch, James Galvin, Thom Gunn, Galway Kinnell, Maxine Kumin, David Lehman, Robert Lowell, Peter Meinke, Howard Nemerov, Muriel Rukeyser, Mary Jo Salter, Floyd Skloot, William Stafford, and Richard Wilbur.

ABOUT THE EDITORS:

Sheila Coghill and Thom Tammaro are the editors of Visiting Emily (Iowa 2000), recipient of a Minnesota Book Award, and Visiting Walt (Iowa 2003), finalist for a Minnesota Book Award. They teach at Minnesota State University Moorhead, where Coghill is professor of English and chair of the English Department and Tammaro is professor of multidisciplinary studies and teaches in the English Department and in the MFA in creative writing program.

A CONVERSATION WITH THE EDITORS:

We talked early one Saturday morning. I was at home in California and the editors were at home in Minnesota, each on a telephone. I asked if we could talk about the influence of Frost on American poets, on voice and subject matter. Ms. Coghill began. "Well, in some ways the influence has been a carryover of what you'd call the pastoral voice of poetry, the voice that speaks from being grounded in the land. Frost is looking at New England when he's writing; that's his basic landscape.

"But it's a very formal voice. It's a voice of the common people. In that way he's no different than Whitman. Except Frost uses meter to express that voice. It's a very down-to-earth voice, and it celebrates nature, it also acknowledges every day human travails. He acknowledges the darker side of life, the harshness. He gets onto paper a common person's connection to the realities of life."

Mr. Tammaro suggested, "One thing Frost has going for him is simply longevity. He has one foot in the 19th Century and one foot in the 20th Century. It's rare the writer that can walk both those worlds. And despite the fact that Frost had doubts and suspicions about the modernist movement that was taking place at the time when he was coming of age as a writer, he stayed the course in terms of his voice and his vision of what a poem should be.

"He was nearly 40 -- 38 -- when his first book came out. Now first books of poetry are out there by people in their early 20s, and many people have two and three and four books by the time they're 40. Frost was so committed to his art and craft and has something many writers don't have, and that is patience with their art. Frost was patient with his art; I encourage patience with their art to my writing students, a difficult thing to do in our contemporary world.

"So, Frost sustains himself as a writer through two centuries. Writing in that 19th Century, he is facing what Sheila and I always talk about with each other as 'washed-out transcendentalism.' It's the reason why Whitman is so great, because he's writing against that strain. And especially when we talk about form with Whitman.

"Frost maintains that sense of formal language. I tell my students, 'If you want to learn how to write blank verse, read Frost.' That absolutely gorgeous blank verse is mesmerizing. He stayed true to that and didn't bite the apple of modernism and go into other directions, and was writing a poetry that was in many ways counter to what modernists were doing, in form as well as content.

"He makes it American. He takes what I'd call the leftover formalism of Puritanism that goes through the 19th Century and he commits it to American imagery and American dialect, American geography."

Ms. Coghill agreed. "Frost wasn't experimental in the way that we think of the early modernists. His influence on poets today is that persistence in looking at place and looking at it closely, exploring it, through the music of language. Regardless of what he was writing, Frost emphasized the music in American language.

"It didn't matter what was going on in his life; he kept his commitment to the beauty of language that he calls 'the sound and the sense.' And the gold in the language, those are things he talks about. He rarely writes about it in essay form the way some writers do, but infuses it into the poems themselves."

"All poetry," said Mr. Tammaro, "reproduces the tones of actual speech or the reproduction of the tones of actual speech. Frost never loses sight of that in his work. There's always the sense of a persona and someone talking in those poems. You're never far from a human voice."

"Tom is right," said Ms. Coghill, "there's always that language in there, and it's always human. That's why people connect to it."

I mentioned, "Someone said to me that you could see the influence of The Georgics on Frost."

Ms. Coghill said, "Frost had an early classical education, in high school in Lawrence. He excelled in a classics program and some of his lyric poetry is very Latinate in terms of the classical meters. In the years that he spent at Harvard, he decided that higher education wasn't for him. But for that first year that he was at Harvard, he was interested in majoring in classics. But what he wanted to do was to write poetry, so he decided not to go to Harvard for the full four years."

Mr. Tammaro observed. "They have a whole different route to being a poet today. By the time you're 22 or 23 you have your MFA in your pocket, and your advisors' recommendations and so on and so forth."

Ms. Coghill added, "Maybe some teaching freshmen under your belt."

"Then," said Mr. Tammaro, "you're on your way. It's a very different world.

"I go back to this again. We have this sense of Frost as this successful poet. But in the 20 years preceding his first books, he's frustrated as a poet. He has failed in his own eyes; he sees himself as a failure.

"He goes off to England in 1912 or '13 and is there for about two and a half years. And of course the great irony is that the great American poet, Robert Frost's first two books are published in England. In England he's writing poems that have New England landscapes and subject matter. He comes back to the States, feted as a great new young American poet.

"Here he is," Mr. Tammaro continued, "40 years old and returning to the U.S. and suddenly he finds himself with great reviews and spoken of as the new voice of American poetry.

"Again, as I said, this longevity and that he's able to sustain himself as a writer is amazing. If you go back and look at the names of winners of the Pulitzer Prize, some of those names we don't remember anymore. Frost won four Pulitzers.

"Like Dickinson and Whitman, if you ask people to name an American poet, Frost is going to be one of those people. Frost's is a name that cuts across class and taste and education. Frost is one of those poets like Dickinson that is taught at all levels -- elementary school, junior high, high school, college, graduate school."

I mentioned I found interesting how many poets writing these poems "inspired by Frost" had met Frost.

Ms. Coghill answered. "Well, part of that had to do with his -- to use his phrase -- 'bard-ing about.' He was on the road, giving reading after reading and lecture after lecture. He was a restless soul. The public readings and lectures put Frost in contact with several generations of writers. Then, beginning in the late 1920s, he started every summer attending the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference in Ripton, Vermont. He went there until he died. That was another way he met young, emerging writers."

"How did you gather the poems printed in this book?"

Ms. Coghill answered, "Well, we asked people. Some things we'd found. We advertised in poetry magazines."

Mr. Tammaro added, "We advertised in Poets and Writers. But the majority of the poems came through work we knew. Then too we invited writers to write specifically for the anthology. There were a number of writers that when we approached them said, 'I don't know that I have anything.' We challenged them to write something. One of the great delights that emerged from such an exchange is the poem by Maxine Kumin.

"She had sat at the feet of Robert Frost listening to him talk about giving a poetry reading. She was able to go back and re-create that moment, where you have Frost in old age, very near death. Marvin Bell was another one. I know Marvin Bell had been going to Bread Loaf for years and he didn't have a poem. I said, 'Marvin, here's an assignment --'

"We paid eight bucks -- I remember writing to Maxine Kumin and saying, 'Here's eight bucks for your assignment.'"

Frost has been quoted as saying that writing free verse is the equivalent of playing tennis without a net. I asked Ms. Coghill and Mr. Tammaro what they made of that statement.

"I think," said Mr. Tammaro, "that's Frost's reaction to modernism. It was his way of saying, 'I'm not going to move into that modernist tendency toward free verse.' That was his way of metaphorically talking about where he stood in relationship to the experiments going on at that time."

"In the 1920s," said Ms. Coghill.

"How," I asked, "do you describe for someone who

doesn't write poetry what blank verse is?"

"I'll give my teacherly response," said Ms. Coghill, noting, "A good way to understand blank verse is that it's the most formal metrical pattern that comes closest to English speech. One way to illustrate that is to recall the first line of 'Mending Wall' -- 'Something there is that doesn't love a wall.'

"It's easy to say, it rolls right off the tongue. If you look at 'Mending Wall,' none of those end words are rhymed. That's why it's called 'blank verse.' It's not rhymed couplets. But it's easy to remember. It's easy to say. It's a natural voice. So that's one way to think about blank verse."

"Frost," said Mr. Tammaro, "was a New Englander by choice, but a Californian by birth."

"His parents," said Ms. Coghill, "came from Lawrence, Massachusetts, but his father got the rustler fever and went out to San Francisco, got a job, called for his wife, so Robert was born out there. His father died when Robert was 11 and the family moved back to Lawrence, where he went to high school."

Mr. Tammaro said that earlier he and Ms. Coghill had been talking about Frost. "He was someone, if they had the MacArthur grants then, would have gotten one. He was always worried about where the money was coming from, and the future that he had, and where he was going to live, and teaching exhausted him, and he wanted to write and he wanted to be a farmer and he was always stressed. I thought if he was around now, he'd probably get one of those MacArthur grants and be set for life.

"Another thing that I think is important about Frost is that he's our first TV poet. There's Frost at that moment when Kennedy's Camelot is about to begin. Frost is at the podium at Kennedy's inauguration, sun blinding him and wind blowing his pages, and he can't read the poem. So he recites 'The Gift Outright.'

"How many millions of Americans remember Robert Frost at that moment? Plus the fact that he crisscrossed the country reading at colleges and universities and civic auditoriums. He used to exhaust himself. He visited one college 39 times. That astounds me that one place would invite him back 39 times. I could understand three and four and five. In some ways he was the first pop culture/celeb poet."

"Kennedy," said Ms. Coghill, "had qualms -- humorous qualms -- about having Frost at the inaugural because he knew Frost was such a monolithic presence, he might overshadow the President."

Mr. Tammaro concluded, "Might steal the day."