THE LIFE OF ROBERT FROST AND HIS POEMS (THE LATEST VERSION) ~

 

R E A D   M E

     Farrar, Straus, Giroux

    2025

JOHN BRADLEY'S SPELLS ~

 

Stopping By Words Spell

Whose words these are I think I know.

Who can really own them, though.

No one will see me stealing here

To watch these words become my own.

My sturdy tongue must think it weird

To mouth such blather far and near

Between your ears, that lovely space

Where song makes clatter something dear.

You give each word a goodly shake

And ask if this is some mistake.

This tune, so familiar, must leak

From the pillow used by Willy Blake.

These words are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have syllables to keep,

And text to eat before I sleep,

And text to eat before I sleep.

________________

John Bradley

As Blood is the Fruit of the Heart

Dos Madres 2025

DIRECTIVE by ROBERT FROST ~

Directive

Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.
The road there, if you'll let a guide direct you
Who only has at heart your getting lost,
May seem as if it should have been a quarry -
Great monolithic knees the former town
Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered.
And there's a story in a book about it:
Besides the wear of iron wagon wheels
The ledges show lines ruled southeast-northwest,
The chisel work of an enormous Glacier
That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole.
You must not mind a certain coolness from him
Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain.
Nor need you mind the serial ordeal
Of being watched from forty cellar holes
As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins.
As for the woods' excitement over you
That sends light rustle rushes to their leaves,
Charge that to upstart inexperience.
Where were they all not twenty years ago?
They think too much of having shaded out
A few old pecker-fretted apple trees.
Make yourself up a cheering song of how
Someone's road home from work this once was,
Who may be just ahead of you on foot
Or creaking with a buggy load of grain.
The height of the adventure is the height
Of country where two village cultures faded
Into each other.  Both of them are lost.
And if you're lost enough to find yourself
By now, pull in your ladder road behind you
And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.
Then make yourself at home.  The only field
Now left's no bigger than a harness gall.
First there's the children's house of make-believe,
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,
The playthings in the playhouse of the children.
Weep for what little things could make them glad.
Then for the house that is no more a house,
But only a belilaced cellar hole,
Now slowly closing like a dent in dough.
This was no playhouse but a house in earnest.
Your destination and your destiny's
A brook that was the water of the house,
Cold as a spring and yet so near its source,
Too lofty and original to rage.
(We know the valley streams that when aroused
Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.)
I have kept hidden in the instep arch
Of an old cedar at the waterside
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail
Under a spell so the wrong ones can't find it,
So can't get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn't.
(I stole the goblet from the children's playhouse.)
Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.

_____________________

Robert Frost

Steeple Bush (1947)

ROBERT FROST IN A NUTSHELL ~

 

T H E    L I B R A R Y   O F   A M E R I C A

Once upon a time Jay Parini and I worked together

for a few days in the academia of Middlebury Vermont ~

I have only fond memories,

he knows his Frost.

ROBERT FROST LETTERS ~

 

R E A D     M E

Harvard

 2021

SHIRLEY CLARKE'S ~ ROBERT FROST ~

 

PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST ~

Robert Frost

portrait by Jeff Wrench

2018

__________________________

Dear Anyone and Everyone in Amherst, MA.,

I have been a regular visitor to your lively (when students are there), quiet (when students are gone) town for well over fifty years.

Recently my companion and I noticed, when waiting at the light at the main street four corners, a painted portrait of what appeared to be the actor Maggie Gyllenhaal and found that both interesting, yet strange. When we were on foot we saw on the reverse side (the sidewalk side) a painted portrait, and quite well done, of the poet Robert Frost. The younger Frost, when he lived in Derry, New Hampshire. Raising chickens.

Of course Frost was well acquainted with Amherst and Amherst College, but don’t you know Emily Dickinson lived a stone's throw down the road from where these portraits are on display? Wouldn’t it be awarding and receptive to have a portrait of Dickinson instead of Gyllenhaal at this popular four corners? Others must be questioning this as well.

At a leafy spot in town one might, one day, see a portrait of Robert Francis! More should know and read this poet.

Maggie

THROUGH ~

Back Road Chalkie

R O B E R T      F R O S T

Spring 2020

ROBERT FROST ~

FROSTS / ROTH ~

Just finished one of the more interesting Frost documents: Robert and Elinor's correspondence with their children, but mainly Leslie, the prettiest one and the one that best survived. Then I started in on Dieter Roth's DIARIES. I doubt there is a bigger leap between books. Not intentional, it's just the way things came about and no doubt the way I am feeling in the extremes of summer between construction work, or planting flowers. Bee balm is a month ahead. Daylilies aren't as magnificent as last year (what and who is?), the deer have munched down the hosta plants from here to Hanover. They know a second growth comes with the plant and they'll be back to actually munch down the rebirth. Survival of the fittest. Robert Frost. Dieter Roth. 

 

Roth was a mischief-maker at making his own handmade books, as few as 10 per title and he made these like Fruitmarket Gallery has chosen to go to great lengths to make this heavenly volume: grey boards with gauze to strengthen the spine. Simple is best.

Family Letters 

of Robert

 and Elinor Frost

edited by Arnold Grade

State University of New York, 1972

~

Diaries

Dieter Roth

Fiona Bradley, Sarah Lowndes,

Jan Voss, Andrea Buttner, Bjorn Roth 

 Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, 2012 
Yale University

                                                                                                   

IN THE CLEARING ~

Robert Frost

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/18/us/for-ranchers-an-uncommon-quest-for-grass-fed-beef.html?hp

http://kbia.org/post/taking-grass-fed-road-less-traveled

Prescott Frost

 RANGES ~

Over four days we took off for ranges unknown. Things developed as we opened our eyes.


First there was heading down to Woodstock, New York to take care of Janine’s grave, and of course she was waiting for us, red granite flat stone from Barre, Vermont. Still young morning we knelt down and brushed the grass cuttings off the gravestone and there we were with her, hard to believe. One year has passed by. We thought to bring flowers, but no, we’ll bring garden flowers from our home next time and plant them here. The ones she told us she likes. The ones we once brought for her home and yard. The ones she never stopped talking about. For the moment we left a lemon sweet on the stone and walked up into town. . .to her favorite art store and rummaged around until something met our eye. . .and when we found the simple steel rings for a notebook, colored gold, green and Janine’s favorite red, we bought all three and returned to the grave and locked those rings together as bracelets that she also always wore and loved and how right this looked for her, and placed them on the glossy stone and left things that way. The lemon sweet shared between us as we walked away.


On the way to Woodstock, from Vermont, we played the new and quite long Bob Dylan album Tempest, and then played it again for good measure, and what do you know the last song ended just as we came into the town. . .climbing the hill. . .look to your left and there’s a restaurant with a sign in the window “Bob Drinks Here.”


I won’t say much about the album. There are lines like cartoon captions, a very long song that rolls on the waves with the familiar sway of an Irish sea-shanty. You know  the song I mean. It goes on for too long but then some people think the Irish go on for too long, others term it endurance and never go to war against the Irish. Dylan doesn’t seem to care what any of us think at this point (or at any point) in his life. Few of the songs can be taken up as one of our own. They’re all his private wonders or demons and since we’re waiting for the songs, he’s giving them to us. He doesn’t mind, it’s what he does. He’s already saved millions of lives. Think about this for a moment. He’s saved millions of lives. He being his songs and his endurance. Don’t sound ignorant, once again, by criticizing the painful and rotting sound of his voice. It’s a voice that has spoken for you. If you don’t think it has, where you been?


We drive home over back roads and along streams and rivers, hill and dale, there’s a story around every bend.


The next day, for breakfast, packed from home, we chow down in a lovely outdoor chapel in northern New Hampshire way the hell up. At the "Shrine of Our Lady of Grace" which we first came upon almost twenty years ago, a spacious cemetery for many motorcyclists, and there are lit totems to tell you just who. So far we have kept away from knowing anything more about this isolated location or any of its history. We prefer finding it on our own. We arrive after traveling before dawn, have breakfast, warm in the sun, then leave for other green pastures. The dead left in their place under the out stretched arms of angels and saints. I saw them when we arrived, I saw them when we left.


We’ll get as far east as Rangley Lakes, Maine where we haven’t been since 1974 and before that Sweetheart came here with her family in 1957 — a drive from Virginia and they stayed a week in one of the snug cabins along the shore. Her sister water-skied. It was America at the time. Wilhem Reich, one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry and a resident of the area passed away in prison the same year. He was sixty years old. If you don’t know about his morality play with the authorities while living in this remote region, go look up his tale of invention and struggle. Today one old-timer is bent down on one knee applying plastic letters to a small sign for his gift shop. Two friends in suspenders watch from a porch until he is done. Like watching him is helping him, and it is in a sort of backcountry-by-the-water-all-day-sort-of-way. I can tell much the temper of the small town by watching these three, who watch the two of us cross a dock for better purchase and a view up lake to the shadowy blue mountains. Sweetheart thinks she may have crossed this dock as a little girl. Could be.


We got here winding high at the top edge of the White Mountains. Through more stalled and junked and beaten to shit equipment that I’ve seen in the back woods any time in my life. Backhoes thunked in place in tall grass, bulldozers stopped and rusted, everywhere a snarling black or silver motorcycle, go-kart, dune buggy, ATVs shot or for sale, or just dumped onto their sides and left. Lumps of yellow work equipment all over the landscape. Homes miserable and hopefully better inside. Hellish ROMNEY signs everywhere, and small pesky flags, and even more shit-canned equipment. No one putting 2 + 2 together. (This is two days before the Romney video is released c/o Mother Jones). Not one, one! OBAMA sign in all our four days flying and weaving the roads over five broad states. Way up in somewhere and don’t ask where New Hampshire someone has mounted onto the side of their old woodshed, about the size of a sheet of plywood, a color photograph of the younger George Bush, smirk and all, with bold words scribed under the poster for all the road to see: “Miss Me Yet?” it asks. Fuck no, I say aloud, as we pass.


ROMNEY signs are all we see in Dixville Notch. Staked in anywhere you can set a stake. You know what happens there in about six weeks. Let’s watch what happens. As for “The Balsams,” the majestic and castle inn splendor of this alpine region, where we once came and had a look and taste without spending a dime, it’s all gone to seed, boarded up and falling to pieces. Dying on the vine with its towers and turrets and craftsmen shaped windows and framing, fantastical and tucked away amongst steep stone ledges and cliffs, the smell of the trees, makes it all the more wondrous of once upon a time. We’re “moving on” and leaving behind, indecently, whole traditions and lives. Expect pay back.


Mt. Washington in cloud cover, but the most beautiful cloud cover. Some mountains are meant not to always be fully seen. All my life coming to Mt. Washington I’ve seen the summit 50% of the time. I love the fact humans can’t always get what they want.


It took good friends in the midwest to tell us all about Sugar Hill, and this after we’ve combed the White Mountains for most of our lives. We were at the Robert Frost home tucked in the woods and white-framed, plunked between Sugar Hill and Franconia, it doesn’t matter — it’s in the woods, and in much better shape than we last left it a few decades ago, when we arrived and it was desolate and seemingly forgotten. Now, on the wall in the small barn renovated into a gift shop/museum, are large black and white photographs of poets who have had residency at this famous poet’s house where its costs $5 to take a self-guided tour, but I figured just like years ago standing at Robinson Jeffers' Pacific-edged home in Carmel — neither man would want us there, never mind standing in their yard, so why bother them now? We have a once-around slow walk of the house, notice the tiny eave windows, and everything bundled about the homestead facing hard the weather freight from the large-size Whites to the east. The view is grand but diminished with the influx of saplings and scrub. We need a woodsman to return.


There’s a guy, probably father and husband, who wants to sell us burgers and fries from his hamburger joint along the highway, and it does look cheery enough with all his kids and others chipping in at preparing food for Saturday night except the host is anxious and pushy and too eager, enough for us to lose our appetite in a flash! He’s got a shelf of small clipboards with menus on each one and all with a pen and nobody is in the place and the clipboards look brand new and and the kids look full of enthusiasm and the host is waiting for us to save his life except we can’t. . .we aren’t that rich.


Every night we drive all the way home through the night to get home, our home — we’ve had rascals wanting to harass our place, mildly terrorize the location, plus we can’t afford a motel room anywhere in this country any longer and instead buy the gas to move. $4 or better in New Hampshire and New York. $3.85 in Vermont. About the same in Maine. We saw one gas station at 6AM New Hampshire Sunday with a reading of $3.75 at the pump. A long line of thirsty vehicles already running out to the road. We will come for gas at this place on our return home and be ready for the next day. By then the price will be bumped to $3.79.


By the third day we’re beach bums all day at the very same place where cops one year ago shook us down for no reason whatsoever except they didn’t like something they were looking at. Or we reminded them of someone else, or something else. Who knows with idiots. I’m not calling them idiots, their superior officer all but called them idiots when we traveled to their station and put in a quiet complaint about his deputies’outrageous behavior. The poor elder ranger all but agreed with our assessment. So little is making sense any longer, except, and thankfully, most people are remaining civil and may want things to make as much sense as you do. It’s one hope.


We don’t see these bad cops anywhere during our beach combing days. Maybe they were reassigned to Siberia? There's just a friendly ranger trimming the hedge outside his outpost and taking our entry fee of $5 which is well worth preserving this birding compound, open waterland, winding dirt road into the puckerbrush and the wild blue yonder. Hiking for miles the edge of that blue yonder, with the tide out, we scavanged up nine sand dollars, none with chips. Barefoot, tramping, and becoming one with the landscape — one more little ingredient to knowing who and where you are.


Today I work in a driftwood weathered cabana open on all sides to the weather and half in the sun. A simple shelter. The ocean is right there.  I can hear some guy carrying a fishing rod over his shoulder and a Park-the-car-in-Harvard-Yard accent coming up from the shore after spending half the morning tossing out a line. It’s pretty free and clear doing what he’s doing and I’m doing; we’re just doing. Though he tells me he’s had “no bites” in over five hours. My Sweetheart naps next to me because she’s driven half the night.


On the beach we stay warm from dawn to noon by staying in the sun. Eat another home packed breakfast, my jacket off and on the wet sand where we hunker down, eyes on the water, wind in her hair.

photo ©  bob  arnold

EARTH ~

Edward Thomas & Robert Frost

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jul/29/robert-frost-edward-thomas-poetry






photo : david mccoy