R is for Robert Frost

(The last two days have been unkind to me as far as posting on my blog is concerned. I wanted to try to play catch-up, but seeing how I have less than an hour left of today, I decided to go forward from where I am and call it good. I'll have to save P and Q for another time.)

I was in junior high when I decided I wanted to be the next Robert Frost. The Road Not Taken was, I am certain, the first of his poems that I was exposed to and fell in love with, but Stopping By Woods On A Snowing Evening was right on its heels. He paints pictures with words, and the pictures he paints include forests and country lanes and old farm houses. Growing up in Oregon, these were images I was familiar with and held very close to my heart. I knew exactly what the places he wrote about looked like, and they were the places I wanted to be. He made me cry with a delicious ache for all of these places he described. More than anything I wanted to be able to paint my own pictures with my own words. I wanted people to see Oregon the way he showed people New England. I wanted to fill people with a longing for my home. I wanted to make people cry.

That's an odd life goal for a thirteen-year-old, but I knew, as Anne Shirley would say, that Robert Frost and I were 'kindred spirits.' When I read his poem Once By The Pacific, I knew it was true. Not only had he seen my ocean (I didn't realize that he born in San Francisco) but he 'got' it:

"The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves looked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before."

That is my Oregon coast. Cliffs and rocks and waves and wildness. Exactly how I like it.

Anyway, I set out to become a poet. I saw the world in poems. The words to the poems didn't always come to me right away, and I didn't pursue every poem and commit it to paper, but the feeling of a poem was practically a daily occurrence. Poetry was how the world spoke to me, and when the poetry was silent, I knew something was wrong. (I dated a guy for four months and realized after we broke up that I had not felt a single poem the whole time we were together. That scared the liver out of me, and I knew to pay more attention the next time around. If the next guy I dated quashed the poetry inside of me, then I wasn't going to waste four months on him. It turned out that the next guy I dated not only did not quash my poetry, but he wrote poems to me. We've been happily married for seventeen years.)

I am not going to be the next Robert Frost. Though I took some poetry classes in high school (near disaster) and college (wonderful), I don't even write a poem a year anymore. I took a creative writing class in college that required us to write a short story, and that was the beginning of the end of my poetry-writing days. My 'short' story was easily three to four times longer than any other story in the class (to this day I cannot write a short story) and the ONLY fantasy. It was crap, but once that bug bit, there was no going back. Aside from that, it's not like I actually have Robert Frost's talent.

Recently I read a quote by him that I must have read during the early days of my poetry mania but had since forgotten. The words are so familiar to me, and say so perfectly what I felt:

"A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a homesickness or a love-sickness. It is a reaching out toward expression, an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found the word."

That's exactly what I mean when I say I felt poems.

Now I see stories. Everything is a story. I very seldom know what the story is, and I actually have a very hard time coming up with stories (I've never been able to make up bed-time stories for my kids), but every time I turn around I find another thing that wants to be a story. Maybe if Robert Frost was here I could explain it to him and he could paint a picture of my feelings with his words. I bet he could.