FROST'S "MEETING AND PASSING": When It's Travel and When It's Only a Shuffling of Feet

Most Americans these days measure travel by the hundreds or thousands of miles, plus introductions to other cultures, languages, features of landscape and human morphology. On its face, that’s all fine, of course; one’s understandings and tolerances might grow because of such exposure.

Or they might not. Stories of rigid, dug-in, self-righteous American tourists are too familiar. The tour buses might as well be labeled Upper Middle Class American Caucasians, peering and aging.  Younger people with backpacks, staying in hostels or actually living in an-Other Place, on some kind of study or exchange program, might become spongier vessels, at least for a few years. 

I’m not ready to say tourists should stay home, but I’m also not jumping to the conclusion that they’ve achieved anything like charitable omniscience and empathy, especially those on the bus. I’m more interested in travel of the mind and heart, which can probably occur in a single chair. That’s an old notion (I think of Emily Dickinson’s “There is no frigate like a book”), but I don’t hear much talk about it.

So here is a Robert Frost sonnet I didn’t know until the Academy of American Poets     www.poets.org posted it as their poem for the day.  Like much of Frost, it feels so casual and general that we might overlook its potential to become The Poem about the nature of human encounters.  

As I went down the hill along the wall
There was a gate I had leaned at for the view
And had just turned from when I first saw you
As you came up the hill. We met. But all
We did that day was mingle great and small
Footprints in summer dust as if we drew
The figure of our being less than two
But more than one as yet. Your parasol
Pointed the decimal off with one deep thrust.
And all the time we talked you seemed to see
Something down there to smile at in the dust.
(Oh, it was without prejudice to me!)
Afterward I went past what you had passed
Before we met, and you what I had passed.

In the final couplet’s word play, I sense a purposeful incompleteness, ambiguity, open-endedness, something dangling. These two characters have talked in a seemingly friendly way. Their footprints have mingled in the dust as they cover more or less the same territory.

A lesser mind than Frost’s might have blissfully concluded that there’s been meaningful communication between the two characters, but I think he’s offering that what they’ve missed in terms of knowing each other is at least as significant as what they’ve shared. They’ve met, passed, shared paths, mingled “great and small”—but Frost’s sneaky enjambment demands that we keep going, to discover that what “mingled great and small” was their footprints, not their souls or hearts.  And the outline of those footprints is etched in dust, not moonlight and roses.

If we meet, we talk, we pass, and then sort of cover each other’s steps, like trackers, how much meaningful bonding has occurred? How much can occur?  I think Frost’s position here parallels his wonderful ambiguity in his more famous line, “Good fences make good neighbors.”  (“Mending Wall” http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173530).  That need for boundaries is ambiguous because he puts it in the mouth of a less than wonderful character, the speaker’s neighbor. But isn’t there truth in his words? But isn’t it a sad truth?

Bluegrass: a Primer

Titling this blog Banjo52 might imply more knowledge of bluegrass and other roots  music than I actually have. On the other hand, I love a lot of it, and Karin at altadenahiker.blogspot.com has just reminded me that there might be folks out there who could use an injection of mountain music but don’t know where to begin. So here’s my ounce of contribution toward a beginning dose of bluegrass. 

My list and links are tilted toward artists who are not so nasal or shrill that they’d put off the new or casual listener. If you google a few of these folks, you’ll also see and hear that bluegrass is a specific kind of country music. While there’s some overlap with Nashville, as well as blues and folk music (especially Scots-Irish), bluegrass is its own critter.

The traditional band includes acoustic guitar, banjo, bass, fiddle, and often mandolin and dobro.  Drums? Piano? Brass?  Never, as far as I know, but “Fusion” is one of the F-words of contemporary culture . . . .  Fusion is also the reason I haven't included Steve Martin or Bela Fleck; they are supremely talented banjoists, but their musical adventurism usually takes them beyond bluegrass, at least in my loosely defined terms. 

Ralph Stanley and Bill Monroe go back to the 1940s or earlier, so they have some of that shrillness, but it’s still good stuff.

Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs began to make inroads into the folk music of the 1960s, and Alison Krause and Emmylou Harris have completed that trend.  Also try the inimitable Doc Watson. I can’t imagine his offending anyone, and newcomers might embrace his mellow voice and soft brilliance on guitar.  If someone objects to his lullaby (next to last in the following lists), keep it to yourself. 

The first three below are older artists, followed by a few notable younger performers (though only Chris Thile is anything like a kid—well, Gillian Welch might not have any gray hair yet). 

Mother Maybelle Carter  (or, the Carter Family)

June Carter Cash    (Maybelle’s daughter, Johnny Cash’s wife)

Jim and Jesse

Tony Rice

Gillian Welch

Iris DeMenthe

Chris Thile  

Black Diamond (West Virginia)

Tom Adams

Norman Blake

Leo Kottke

Too Much of a Good Thing? 

Also, you could google any of the names John Hartford mentions in this link in addition to hearing a somewhat homogenized version of a classic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iy_CZDtIuz0

Earl Scruggs, Doc Watson, Ricky Skaggs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKjnMMMYE-c 

Doc Watson and Chris Thile

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_w6IBbwWxc

June Carter Cash 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eydz4l07jl8

Doc Watson, a lullaby     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYSIFzSX7E0

Sleepy Man Banjo Boys (even kids do it): 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXcRI0BdioE

I hope this info, fundamental as it is, starts a stampede.  If you do some wandering on YouTube, please permit yourself some extra pleasure by looking entering “clog dancing” in the search bar. 

Anne Sexton's "Letter Written on a Ferry While Crossing Long Island Sound"

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Letter Written on a Ferry While Crossing Long Island Sound by Anne Sexton : The Poetry Foundation

As the photos suggest, I’m sometimes infatuated with the ocean, though all I do is look at it. But who can deny that the sea’s motor goes on and on and on. Surely it will wear out someday, yet it doesn’t. Only the sky is bigger. So we sometimes become annoyed at the hugeness and endlessness of oceans, which so belittle our human situation. At the same time, who can fail to be stunned mute at all that action, all that beauty?

Anne Sexton, for one.  I think the opening of her "Letter Written on a Ferry . . . " is an absolute winner and attention-grabber, even as it considers attributing to the 

ocean the speaker’s ennui:

           I am surprised to see

      that the ocean is still going on.

Today, rather than going on and on about the jackpots I’ve found in a poem, I'm asking readers to pick their favorite images or lines from the poem. Although I love several of Sexton’s details, today I'm just as fascinated by the progress of her observations and thoughts. How does she get to the nuns and what is it that she’s doing with them, particularly after the opening references to her failing relationship, to life preservers, life boats (made of cement!), and seemingly crucial little items for getting us through our lives. Can keys and wallets save her, or us? 

I was waiting for Sexton to turn on the nuns and criticize or mock them. However, while I hear some comedy in certain details, I think the overall picture is respectful. She sees the nuns as having found a way to escape the oldness of the sea; unlike the speaker, they are not weighed down by lost love and aging. In fact, doesn't Sexton envy them, perhaps because they're safe up there, out there, flying above the perils of romantic relationships, with all that gravity and the pull of the sea?  

 

Letter Written on a Ferry While Crossing Long Island Sound by Anne Sexton : The Poetry Foundation

*

"Frying Trout While Drunk" by Lynn Emanuel

Eye to Eye

Frying Trout While Drunk by Lynn Emanuel : Poetry Magazine

At the risk of belaboring the osprey photos, it recently occurred to me to crop them for a still more Gothic effect. Then of course I felt I had to find a poem that was at least loosely connected. I ended up at Lynn Emanuel’s “Frying Trout While Drunk,” which I find disturbing and moving.

Mother and Child?

The osprey—for convenience I’m making her female—seems to have more control over her cornetfish than the poem’s Mother has over her trout (or her man, or her daughter), but who knows. That huge bird had to work so long and hard at the skinny, bug-eyed fish that l I eventually lost interest. Who’s to say that this was easy work for the predator? Maybe she was struggling to stay balanced atop that pole. Maybe it was her first cornetfish, which required new skills for consumption.

Maybe she’d eat only a fraction of the fish before flying it home and offering it to her osprey-man “of lechery so solid/you could build a table on it/and when you did the blues would come to visit.”  Maybe it will be “with the care of the very drunk” that she hands him the plate.

In a poem full of strong images, these lines struck me as particularly powerful:

            She is a beautiful, unlucky woman

            mother’s dress falling to the floor,   

            buttons ticking like seeds spit on a plate.   

            the knife in one hand and the trout  

            with a belly white as my wrist.

These are images of a domestic scene I haven’t had to know. I think Lynn Emanuel presents it with admirable restraint and minimal self-pity or self-righteous accusation. I find myself thinking of Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” but Emanuel might have more control over her subject than Plath did. 

THE OSPREY AND THE CORNETFISH, WITH STEPHEN CRANE

Here is an osprey lunching on a long, skinny blue fish with a ridiculously long nose and bulging eyes. It’s a blue cornetfish. He’s usually a brownish-grey color with bright turquoise spots, but like the chameleon, he changes colors to blend with his environment. So I’ve decided this guy is imitating the sky because he knows he’s going to cornetfish heaven when the osprey gets full or takes the one bite that finishes everything. The osprey himself is a gorgeous animal. I think of him as a swamp eagle—maybe I heard that or maybe I made it up. In any case, he’s a great soaring bird, a fisher. The blue of the cornet fish is also beautiful, but he’s otherwise one of those ocean oddballs. He’s interesting because he’s odd, yet how seriously can we cheer for those alligator eyes and snout? Also, he feeds on other fish, not plants. Once again I offer Stephen Crane’s odd and chilling little poem, a poem that encourages modesty: A Man Said to the Universe by Stephen Crane : The Poetry Foundation And speaking of eating flesh, here again is Crane again with “In the desert”: In the Desert by  Stephen  Crane  : The Poetry Foundation *

Zapruder, Day Two. Windbag Alert. Teacher Instruction. Bed and Breakfasts, continued.

The Prelude by Matthew Zapruder : Poetry Magazine

From time to time, visitors’ comments get me all wound up, because they open new windows onto a poem, and I use those comments and my responses as a post unto themselves. This is such a day.  Lucky you.

I just said to a friend that sometimes I weary of blogging, but I realize that it leads me to new poems and poets, and it usually makes me like the poems better as I look at them more carefully. Zapruder’s “The Prelude” is a case in point.

Add to that the comments I get from readers—whole new humans opening up aspects of the poem that I hadn’t considered, and sometimes aspects of themselves—I tell you, it’s better than NASCAR, and I bet it’s better than crack.

Sidebar:           

Speaking of a need for artificial stimulation . . .

So many, many times I’ve heard teachers, parents and other putatively caring adults who need to tone down their advice-giving to young people who have stalled, or gotten into real trouble. Instead simply asking, then asking again, searching for specifics, “What do you like? What would you rather be doing? How can we work that into a course of study and, with some luck, a career? I don’t care if Mommy’s a CEO. If you like woodworking, let’s look into that.” 

But in a sad miracle, the talk—it’s not a conversation—stops at, “You have to do better . . .  because I said so.”

I predict the geezer will toss out 20 times as many words as the teen. What are the teen’s options, beyond being overwhelmed and probably resentful and maybe enraged? Oh, he may obey, but look it up:  obedience is not a synonym for cure.  

End of Sidebar.  Beginning of Comments, Yours and Mine.

 Brenda's Arizona said...

"...should the chosen guide
Be nothing better than a wandering cloud,
I cannot miss my way.” 
So did Wordsworth follow his desire whereas Coleridge couldn't? 

I have been told by B&B owners that the reason they have the business is to fulfill the need to follow a desire. You have come full circle, Banjo!
And I'd love to see more photos of the B&B where you stayed. These are inviting, but please - more coffee.

February 8, 2013 at 11:19 AM

 

 altadenahiker said...

Filled with self-deprecating humor, isn't it. And comparing himself, as a poet I think, with Wordsworth the nature boy and Coleridge the tortured soul, he comes up short in his own estimation. 

I find B&B's creepy, too. Especially when they've filled your room with stuffed animals. But maybe that's a Northern Calif thing.

B and AH, about the poem, what you say is the way I see it. I seem to remember that Wordsworth’s hikes were considerable. I followed one of his routes in the Lake District, and it was much more than a stroll in those almost-mountains. Maybe he really was more adventurous than Coleridge—or Zapruder.

I was at first curious that Coleridge’s “love of friends” wasn’t more comfort than it was, but Zapruder, ever the poet, adds more threatening stuff:  “love of friends and the wind.” Oh, that wind.

And there’s more. The wind is “taking his arrow away.”  Is it a phallic arrow? Whether or not, it’s his edge, and most of us would say, I think, that we want our edge (as well as our “ease”—face it, we want it all).

Do you think the last two lines hint at suicide? If so, is that too “big” for a  poem that opens with Diet Coke?

The more I read this thing, the more I like it. I’ve said umpteen times here (not that it’s original) that poems almost always need to offer surprises (sometimes “gifts”) along the way. In that context, compare the tone and mood of the first two lines with the last two lines. Talk about a journey! 

And that thorough analysis of chocolate, leading into vapor (“nothing”), then back to a field and finally to “ham and rustic chambered cheese”—I hear a dialectic between airy nothing and richly sensuous items, items of appetite and delight, culminating in chocolate.

I’m also drawn to the almost confessional mode of his wishing to be “at least a little more than intermittently/at ease with being loved. I am never at ease.”  That has a peculiar power for me.  Is it just me?

Even in terms of grammar and syntax, how does Zapruder get away with the gangly “at least a little more than intermittently”?  But the speaker is something of a brainiac, and brainiacs say stuff like that. Or at least they think it.

Did anyone see baseball on the horizon?  But it fits. It’s the more common pleasure to accompany his more “poetic” and neurotic items like the hallway and time?  What’s bigger than time? What’s more ordinary than baseball? How do we get them into the same poem? Zapruder does, and for me that’s a happy surprise, a gift. 

The Prelude by Matthew Zapruder : Poetry Magazine

Matthew Zapruder's "The Prelude" : Bed, Breakfast, Cupfulls of Darkness

The Prelude by Matthew Zapruder : Poetry Magazine

Blogger is disallowing paragraphs and photo captions (I thought, for example, about "Baby in the Fireplace"). So I apologize, but I'm also sick of messing with Blogger, so here we go. I recently spent a night at a Bed & Breakfast after years or decades of avoiding the forced intimacy I’ve felt at those places. I do not want conversation until my third coffee, and with strangers you never know whether you want chat at all until you’re in the middle of it. Even if it’s going well, you have to gauge whether the other party has had enough of you. Are your questions a bit invasive? Are you not sufficiently enthusiastic about their grandbaby or the golf game? Of course the upside of good B&Bs is the lack of predictability, the potential uniqueness of buildings, hosts, and other guests, the change of pace from chain motels, which are rectangles of stone on stone in the midst of asphalt parking lots beside interstate highways. So I did what anyone would do—went to Poetry Foundation and typed into the search bar “bed and breakfasts,” expecting to find little or nothing, for surely real poets don't do tea and crumpets Bed and Breakfasts. At first I didn’t trust what I found, Matthew Zapruder’s “The Prelude,” the title of which is an allusion to Wordsworth's major poem. Zapruder opens with the jaunty, sarcastic, “Oh this Diet Coke is really good.” Are we headed for a puerile satire on bourgeois superficiality and tastelessness? That deserves satire, but haven’t we had enough? Isn’t it too easy for anyone over 25? http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/239964 However, in Zapruder’s third line, he got my interest. Diet Coke, it turns out, "tastes / like nothing plus the idea of chocolate, or an acquaintance of chocolate" He’s looking for a specificity about, and shades of meaning in, Diet Coke that I find both absurd and intriguing. And here are two passages in the poem that make it well worth our consideration: "All I follow is my own desire,/ sometimes to feel, sometimes to be/ at least a little more than intermittently/ at ease with being loved. I am never/ at ease. Not with hours I can read or walk/ and look at the brightly colored/ houses filled with lives . . ." And his ending: Come to the edge/ the edge beckoned softly. Take/ this cup full of darkness and stay as long/ as you want and maybe a little longer.

I don’t trust bold, defiant, heroic, hippie claims such as, “All I follow is my own desire.” I’m skeptical about his having “Come to the edge,” and I’m not at all sure I want “this cup full of darkness.” They smack of daredevil bravado. Also, if you have to tell us about the great danger, loneliness, and isolation you’ve experienced and still seek—you the loner, adventurer, outcast, rebel—I wonder what’s inside you. Fear of others? Intolerance of others because others get in the way of your Me, Me, Me. Your death wish or misery wish—because those who aren’t miserable aren’t deep?

But of course I’ve engaged in those very thoughts, however briefly and foolishly. My edges are probably pretty rounded, even padded, and I might have thimbles where Zapruder finds cupfulls of darkness.

So Zapruder’s lines would be bogus if I spoke them in earnest about myself, but maybe he’s earned them. After all, he started with his confession that he’s anxious and rarely “at ease with being loved.” He likes books and walks that include snooping just a little into other people’s lives. Maybe he’s not going for a Kerouac-James Dean-counter culture hero status. Maybe he’s just inviting us to take in some more of the color and the darkness that might make our lives fuller if we’ll stand up and notice them. Once again, I don’t mean to force a false connection between the poem and a Bed & Breakfast, which after all gets only a brief mention in Zapruder’s “The Prelude.” And was that B&B an edge? Or a cup full of darkness? No, but at that quirky old house I did find still more ways to wonder about and enjoy what’s quirky enough to keep myself a little off balance about things. The Prelude by Matthew Zapruder : Poetry Magazine