I generally like to show up in your inbox once a month, and to offer something of value to you. This piece is coming in early because - well - it wanted to be written.
A few months ago, one of my local representatives asked if I would be willing to offer the opening devotional to the Vermont State House on March 26th. A new resolution honoring Robert Frost was going to the floor.
It’s always an honor to speak in front of any audience. Attention is never something I take for granted. A mentor once told me: people do not owe us their time. We must earn it. I believe this.
I hesitated at first to say yes to the speaking engagement - not because I wasn’t honored, but because I have a complex relationship with Robert Frost.
Howard Sochurek The LIFE Picture Collection
In short - Frost follows me everywhere. Or I him.
I helped Bennington College acquire his Stone House a few years ago when the museum director was ready to retire and wanted the house to remain as a museum.
For a few years I was knee-deep in Frost biographies and manuscripts, engaging students and locals in a new version of the Frost Farm (of which there are a few, including one in New Hampshire). I fielded calls from his granddaughter and relatives. I chased woodcuts and first editions. I spent a lot of time thinking about how to link Frost with a more contemporary dialogue - and I found it in the convergence of farming, literature, and place-based art-making.
Frost Stone House, Shaftsbury VT
Later, when I moved to working with Middlebury College, I began directing the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference. The original Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference was one of Frost’s most enduring professional associations. My current office neighbor, the esteemed writer Jay Parini, is one of Frost’s biographers. I regularly talk to students while standing in front of Frost’s Bread Loaf farmhouse and apple trees.
It’s a lot of Frost, especially for a woman who feels the southern gothic tradition coursing through her blood.
Frost’s cabin kitchen in Ripton, VT
Back to the speech invitation, which I turned over in my head a few times.
Lately I’ve been trying to proceed in authentic ways. Should I say yes to a speaking engagement if I don’t believe fully in Frost’s goodness? Did I need to separate art and artist here? Could I find a way through that represented my true feelings - that Frost was an important poet but not a great human being? That there are many other poets also worthy of our attention and celebration?
Me, speaking at the VT State House this week
I decided that I would take the speaking gig - because I felt that my representative and the Legislature trusted me to speak my truth in a thoughtful way (I love this about Vermont). So that’s what I decided to do. I also felt it was an important time to talk about Hannah Arendt’s ideas about the banality of evil, and the importance of the humanities in this era - the way they provide clarity and solace.
One of the advantages of having a better seat at the table these days is that I can open up conversations and doors in ways that I couldn’t before. So if I can complicate our collective understanding of a subject (Frost) or shine the spotlight on someone who deserves a little more attention (Vermont’s legacy of excellent poets), I do.
My remarks to the Vermont Legislature indicate my truth - that Frost is a remarkably important poet - but a better artist than human. Frost helped usher us into a modern era of poetry and build Vermont’s literary culture, and for that I’m grateful.
What I did not say in my remarks: Every June, I open up the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference in front of the legendary blue curtain, where greats like Toni Morrison and Willa Cather and Anne Sexton once read - and where for 29 sessions Frost read his poems and brooded in the back, once lighting a manuscript on fire in a moment of professional jealousy.
I also did not mention my thoughts on Frost as a father. By many accounts, he wasn’t a great one. While he did set his son up at the Stone House as a farmer, he criticized his son’s efforts at poetry. His son ended his own life in the kitchen at that house. Everywhere you look in Frost’s life, there’s darkness. Real darkness.
I spent many long days alone in the Frost Stone House as we worked to re-open it. I believed in its importance and its ability to offer the community an arts space - a cultural exchange focused on farming and the arts. I still believe in that idea, and love the trails and the way the light streams into the barn, and the people from the College who oversee it.
(You can still visit. The farm has an honest quality to it that I appreciate.)
I’ll be frank here - I believe in ghosts. I’m southern. It’s compulsory. And I felt them there at the Stone House.
If you know me, you know I often show up to work with a dog. Before it was Fig or Radish, it was Nash - a black, flat-coated retriever who followed my every move and instruction. We were deeply connected around the time I was working at the Frost Stone House.
The only time Nash willfully disobeyed me was when I asked him to enter the Frost House with me. He refused to step foot across the threshold into the kitchen. Multiple times. He’d shiver outside on the stone steps until I put him back in my car.
We both felt that darkness.
So if you ask me about my reservations, they exist.
But I believe in complexity, and there is a powerful rational case for celebrating Frost. He is a behemoth of literature, he made important work in Vermont, and his reputation can survive critical inquiry and multitudes. As I said in my comments (available below): There is a strain of darkness running through the world and even within each of us, and Frost wasn’t afraid to look at it.
xo
MMB
My comments on Frost for the Vermont State House Devotional
Let me begin with an inelegant confession: I became a writer because I loved Nancy Drew. Old inns, soft mysteries, an antique clock with a message inside. This is not something a literary academic brags about, but it’s true.
It is because of this obsession with Nancy Drew that led my friend to walk me through an abandoned house in Shaftsbury. While there, I found a box of pamphlets and letters. On the top was an original Christmas card from Robert Frost. I gasped. The paper was dusty but thick and well-preserved. Holding it was like touching history, touching an old part of Vermont that feels precious, possibly even fleeting.
Every Christmas, first in 1929 and annually from 1934-1962, Robert Frost printed small chapbooks filled with poetry and woodcuts by artists like JJ Lankes, whom Frost bonded with over a love of the simple and primitive. Together they distrusted technology and the thrust of so-called progress. They admired gnarled apple trees, farming, hard work, authenticity.
In his 1937 Christmas card, Frost penned a biting poem called Letter to a Young Wretch, a pointed response to a young boy who cut down a birch tree on Frost’s property in Shaftsbury.
I could have bought you just as good a tree
To frizzle resin in a candle flame,
And what saving it would have meant to me.
But tree by charity is not the same
As tree by enterprise and expedition.
I must not spoil your Christmas with contrition.
It is your Christmases against my woods.
But even where, thus, opposing interests kill,
They are to be thought of as opposing goods
Oftener than as conflicting good and evil;
Which makes the war god seem no special dunce
For always fighting on both sides at once.
Frost sometimes titled this poem Boethius - a nod to a Roman philosopher who believed that humans often fail to recognize evil as part of a divine whole. Evil is everywhere, a part of life. It is, as philosopher Hannah Arendt once implied, ordinary and banal. Frost saw that darkness in our snow-drenched landscape and gray skies, in warring nations, in neighbors, and in himself.
I myself feel drawn to writing which acknowledges life as it really is, not just as we want it to be. There is a strain of darkness running through the world and even within each of us, and Frost wasn’t afraid to look at it.
Lodged
The rain to the wind said,
“You push and I’ll pelt.”
They so smote the garden bed
That the flowers actually knelt
And lay lodged-though not dead.
I know how the flowers felt.
As mud season swallows us, each of us knows this faded-flower feeling Frost spoke of. We know it physically and spiritually. All of us fold and rise.
Frost is an inarguable hero of letters, but not necessarily a hero of humanity. He was, by many accounts, a troubled and flawed friend, father, and partner. I do not want to make a hero out of him as a human, only as an artist who walked us into the modern era of poetry - penning his most significant and Pulitzer prize-winning work from a stone house in southern Vermont, two miles south of my own.
These poems represent a sort of baseline from which we can measure change - Frost’s poems are agricultural. They speak of deep snows, family farms, horses, aspects of life in Vermont which are both iconic and lesser seen today.
Frost is easy to misread in his simplicity - make no mistake that melancholy and a sort of dark spirituality course underneath the lines. The critic Calvin Trillin made Frost a poet when he announced at a dinner party: I regard Robert Frost as a terrifying poet.
As someone who once taught at Bennington College, oversaw the College’s acquisition of Frost’s Stone House in Shaftsbury, and who now directs the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference at Middlebury - one of Frosts’ longest associations - I am thankful for the bedrock he provides for Vermont’s literary culture. It’s like a stone-cold slab of marble that we built a progressive and nature-forward literary culture upon.
Think of the incredible poets Vermont has birthed or housed: Mary Oliver, who worked at Bennington for years. Mary Ruefle. Sydney Lea. Major Jackson. Louise Gluck. Dan Chiasson. Ruth Stone and her granddaughter Bianca. Jay Parini. And all of the poets who orbit around Bennington College, VCFA, UVM, Middlebury, and Bread Loaf.
I ask you also to consider the value of the humanities in this fraught moment - as nature degrades in front of our eyes and we fall into the seduction of screens, and violence takes root in other nations. Think of the way we need to educate the general public and our students on the value of natural beauty and justice. Think of the way we turn to poetry and the humanities in our lowest moments. Think of timeless poems like Frost’s as accessible solace in these moments, and try to hear them again for the first time with fresh ears - to feel the melancholy beneath, the nod to impermanence and grief that feels suddenly modern. Try to really hear them:
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
Thank you for your time this morning, thank you for your support of environmental issues and the humanities, and for what you do for our beautiful state of Vermont.