Hemlock

During the arduous months of preparation for my junior poet presentation at University of Dallas, way back in good ole 1997, a few things stand out.  One, Enya's album Watermark.  I must have listened to that CD 100 times as I tried to decipher the meaning of over 100 poems, so that I could somehow spout this information back out to a roundtable of professors, some whom I had never met, in a somewhat coherent fashion.  I am very proud of myself, of course, because I passed. 

Looking back over the years, though, I occasionally think about what I could have done to improve my presentation.  I've come up with a few things.  One, I would have gone back in time and gone to UD my freshman year, so that I would have understood that Jr. Poet had a placement, purposefully set forth by the founding faculty for the junior year of study, for very specific reasons.  As it was, I transferred in my junior year, and did not have the advantage of having taken two years of literary tradition to prepare me for this frightening project!  Two, I would have tried to find a silent place in nature to soak up all the information, instead of listening to Enya in a tiny apartment that I shared with two other people :). 

Those two things aside, what did I learn from this experience?  Well, like many things in life, especially academically - related ones, the real learning happens after the event.  While you're going through it, you are just trying to stay above water.  Get through one day at a time, learning as much as you can, like the brain of a spongy three year old.  Then, you spout out your non-processed, massive amounts of knowledge to a group of people who are much more knowledgeable than you are on the subject, come at it from a completely different angle, and are expecting you to defend your teetering position.  I managed.  I survived.

Since then, my enjoyment of Robert Frost is now at an all - time level of appreciation.  The man who stated that "good fences make good neighbors" knows what he is talking about.  Every day I look out my window at my neighbors' homes, staring me back squarely in the face, and think how right he was.  Frost's love of nature and peace stirred something up inside me that I've never quite been able to quell - that longing to live off the grid.  I love that his poetic philosophy was that "all poetry is a reproduction of the tones of actual speech;"  that identifies with my insatiable need for practicality in all things - even poetry. My husband Joe always says he isn't a fan of poetry.  In return I always say, "good poetry is not flowery speech without intent; it is saying what you mean and meaning what you say - with elegance."  That, to me is Robert Frost.  And that, for me, is what I took from my Junior Poet Project.

My dad and I once found a hemlock tree on the island, up in the hills and west of the s-curves, where we posted a copy of the following Frost poem:
"The way a crow shook down on me
The dust of snow from a hemlock tree
Has given my heart a change of mood
And saved some part of a day I had rued..."

And that is putting love of nature into intentional elegance.