What Is to Be Done? (on contemporary poetry and reviewers)

Oh, I am often out in the cold with my taste in poetry, but I am glad to see that others also have a poor opinion of Robert Frost. Mind you, I often quote his criticism and poetic theory which I find far more interesting than his poetry, but there you go. Today I came across a long article on PIP's blog - Project for Innovative Poetry by Douglas Messerli, poet, editor and publisher - http://pippoetry.blogspot.com/2011/03/what-is-to-be-done-on-contemporary.html. As I say, it is lengthy, so if you haven't the time or the interest to read it all, let me print for you here a footnote which I found hilarious.

"*I haven’t read what David Orr describes as Susan Wheeler’s “very funny imitation” of Frost, but I myself have written a satiric poem “after” Frost:

The Acquaintance
(after Robert Frost)

I have been, I have
walked, I have outwalked.
I have looked, I have passed
And dropped my eyes.
I have stood still
When far away,
Come to houses
But not to call
And further still
One luminous clock
Proclaimed the time
Taken to be.

I might add that perhaps the funniest of all “satires” on Frost might be the Richard Adler and Jerry Ross song from The Pajama Game, “Hernando’s Hideaway,” the music of which is written in the same rhythm as Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” If one puts the music to Frost’s poem, it is difficult to read the poem thereafter with a straight face.

DOUGLAS MESSERLI"

An Old Man's Winter Night - Robert Frost

All out of doors looked darkly in at him
Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars,
That gathers on the pane in empty rooms.
What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze
Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand.
What kept him from remembering what it was
That brought him to that creaking room was age.
He stood with barrels round him -- at a loss.
And having scared the cellar under him
In clomping there, he scared it once again
In clomping off; -- and scared the outer night,
Which has its sounds, familiar, like the roar
Of trees and crack of branches, common things,
But nothing so like beating on a box.
A light he was to no one but himself
Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what,
A quiet light, and then not even that.
He consigned to the moon, such as she was,
So late-arising, to the broken moon
As better than the sun in any case
For such a charge, his snow upon the roof,
His icicles along the wall to keep;
And slept. The log that shifted with a jolt
Once in the stove, disturbed him and he shifted,
And eased his heavy breathing, but still slept.
One aged man -- one man -- can't keep a house,
A farm, a countryside, or if he can,
It's thus he does it of a winter night.