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AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: Kay Ryan on Robert Frost

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Curtis Fox: This is Poetry Off the Shelf from the Poetry Foundation. It's September 19th, 2007. I'm Curtis Fox. This week, the real Robert Frost, not that crusty old guy with the white hair. In the current issue of Poetry magazine, Kay Ryan reviews The Notebooks of Robert Frost, which Harvard University Press recently published. Today, I'm talking with Kay Ryan about Robert Frost, and maybe I'll get her to read some of her favorite Frost poems. J.D. McClatchy calls Kay Ryan “an anomaly in today's literary culture, as intense and elliptical as Dickinson, as buoyant and rueful as Frost.” She joins me from the studios of KQED in San Francisco. Hopefully more buoyant than rueful. Hi, Kay.

Kay Ryan: Hi Curtis.

Curtis Fox: So, in your review in Poetry magazine, you said something, and you said it just in passing, but it really grabbed my attention. You say that Robert Frost wrote the most beautiful American poems of the 20th century.

Kay Ryan: I do think that he did write the most beautiful. I don't think he has any competition. I think he's our great 20th century poet—astonishingly, breathtakingly skilled and magical at his best.

Curtis Fox: We'll get to some of your favorite Frost poems in a moment. But first, I wanted to ask you about The Notebooks of Robert Frost that just came out and that you reviewed for Poetry. And the first sentence of your review says, “Reading Frost's private notebooks is the opposite of pulling back the curtain on Oz.” What do you mean by that?

Kay Ryan: Well, Oz is a little guy with a big speaker system. When you get inside the curtain with Frost, you find he's just gigantic to himself. He's never down. The constant power of his voice actually becomes exhausting in the notebooks, he's his own.

Curtis Fox: So, the notebooks are a collection of his private jottings, his diary entries, drafts of poems. What else is in there?

Kay Ryan: He has a lot of his Yankee sayings in there. He was a chicken farmer for some time in his early years while he was writing his first three books of poems and not getting them published, apparently.

Curtis Fox: And not doing very well at chicken farming either as I understand.

Kay Ryan: No, doing really crappily at chicken farming. And he got something like seven poems published in ten years. It was a very hard time for him, but he was collecting the wisdom of chicken farmers and of New Englanders, and he was writing it down. And he said at one point that his intention was to get (UNKNOWN) and (UNKNOWN). It was a pose. And, as a matter of fact, Frost had so many poses, it just astonishes me that he could shake them off and write so beautifully.

Curtis Fox: Well, the pose that he had toward the end of his life was sort of as the gray eminence, the wizened Yankee uncle type, and I think it has made him extremely uncool to younger poets and to younger readers of poetry.

Kay Ryan: Well, I can see several reasons why he would be really uncool. He's taught to every child in America and probably all over the world because his poems are accessible in the languages, is accessible and clear. And he's such a great model for saying, yeah, this is iambic pentameter. This is ABAB.

Curtis Fox: Right.(LAUGH) That's enough to kill a poet. Yeah.

Kay Ryan: Yeah. But in addition, it is that attention, I think, to his later years when he was simply, he bestrode the earth as the American poet.

Curtis Fox: And he was flagrantly patriotic, too. He was the greatest of patriots, or he saw himself as the greatest of patriots. And that's sort of…among literary types that can be a bit of a turnoff as well.

Kay Ryan: I think something that might go a long ways to making him more sympathetic to youth would be if people looked at how hard it was for him as a young man to get anywhere. He had to learn everything on his own.

Curtis Fox: He quit college because he didn't think he was going to learn anything about poetry there, right?

Kay Ryan: Right. He quit college because he didn't want poetry talked about, like you wouldn't want your lover talked about. It was too important to him. He was kind of self-damned, but really damned. He wasn't doing a good job taking care of his wife and children. He wasn't providing a living. It was a very hard thing to believe in himself.

Curtis Fox: Well, another thing that could turn people around on Frost, not that they…not that he's ever become unpopular, but if people ignore him because of his image, just to go back to the poems. And I think of “Spring Pools,” which you mentioned in your essay.

Kay Ryan: Yes, I was just brought up short by “Spring Pools” not too long ago.

(RECORDING STARTS)

ROBERT FROST:
Spring pools.

These pools that, though in forests, still reflect
The total sky almost without defect,
And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver,
Will like the flowers beside them soon be gone.
And yet not out by any brook or river,
But up by roots to bring dark foliage on.
The trees that have it in their pent-up buds
To darken nature and be summer woods—
Let them think twice before they use their powers
To blot out and drink up and sweep away
These flowery waters and these watery flowers
From snow that melted only yesterday.

(RECORDING STOPS)

Kay Ryan: “Spring Pools” has that tension that Frost loves. He wants to put forces against each other and have them battle each other. And it's a very muscular kind of thing.

Curtis Fox: The poem is really about the pools that form from the ice from winter.

Kay Ryan: Yes, yes. He's referring to pools that occur briefly at the beginning of spring and then are drained away. And he shakes his hand at nature and says, you shouldn't do this. But the only place that these pools survive, these chilly, gorgeous, shimmering, reflected pools, and this is a very artful poem, it's more artful than many. He has all sorts of visual reversals, if you're reading the poem and oral reversals and oral repetitions, if you're hearing it.

Curtis Fox: Can I get you to read it?

Kay Ryan: Yes.

Curtis Fox: And you should feel free to comment on it as you read it as well.

Kay Ryan: Oh, OK. OK. Spring pools. “These pools that, though in forests, still reflect the total sky almost without defect. And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver, will like the flowers beside them soon be gone.” And, like, to stop right there and say, the pools are reflecting the sky almost perfectly. And now in the third and fourth lines, we have frost repeating, perfectly mirroring a set of what? Five words.

Robert Frost: And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver, will like the flowers beside them soon be gone.

Kay Ryan: And these line up perfectly when you're reading this poem. It's just a very interesting thing and not very, not something that I think of as common for him. So, to go on. “And yet not out by any brook or river, but up by roots to bring dark foliage on.” And it just tickles me that he says dark foliage. It has a sense of malevolence to it. These are the malefactors who are draining away these innocent pools. And I do associate the spring pools with, you know, that early life, that early time and life that is completely clear and cool and innocent and untroubled. Second stanza. “The trees that have it in their pent-up buds to darken nature and be summer woods. Let them think twice before they use their powers to blot out and drink up and sweep away these flowery waters and these watery flowers from snow that melted only yesterday.”

Curtis Fox: Yeah. And you said that Frost wrote some of the most beautiful poems of the 20th century. And there's some of the most beautiful lines in this poem. “These flowery waters and these watery flowers,” that echoes so perfectly. The mirroring that a spring pool would do of what's above and around it.

Kay Ryan: Absolutely. And look at, I mean, look at how the two words are like narcissus looking into the water. I mean, it's just reversed. Flowery waters, watery flowers.

Curtis Fox: Very simple, but, man, it has an effect. Yeah. Now, you say in your essay that Frost was a control freak, and you cite this poem as an example where he sort of loses control a little bit. And that's where its power come from. What do you mean by that?

Kay Ryan: Oh, I would like to say, I mean, I think we all attempt to control everything we can, generally do, but that to write a poem, not just “Spring Pools,” but “Spring Pools” is an example, you have got to get in over your head. I really feel the genuineness, and I don't even know why I bother to say this, but I, when he says, let them think twice, let these trees think twice about doing this. It feels so personal to me that he is really in this poem, gotten himself so much on the side of these beautiful, shimmering, very, very temporary pools in his thinking and in that part of himself that he just is furious at the forces that will doom this, that do doom these pools. He couldn't have thought of it if he'd been in control. I just think when your reason is operating, you can't think of something as good as the trees that have it in their pent-up buds to darken nature and be summer woods. I just don't think you can do that without having a good dudgeon worked up, you know, without being just transfigured in a way.

Curtis Fox: Now, Frost was a master of metaphor. He's known not only as a formal poet, but for his wonderful use of metaphor. And he had some interesting things to say about metaphors, including that every metaphor ultimately breaks down. And there's one poem of his that I hadn't read that you recommended, which is called “The Silken Tent,” which is basically an exercise in an extended metaphor.

Kay Ryan: Absolutely.

Curtis Fox: And I wanted to see if you could set that poem up. What's it about?

Kay Ryan: “The Silken Tent” is just this amazing single trope, and it really sounds silly, reduced prose. I mean, if you try to talk about this poem, you have to say something like, Frost compares a woman to a silken tent. And as the day goes on, the guys, the ropes loosen as they dry out. They're tighter when they're wet. So, the dews all dried and they loosen. And now this silken tent is standing almost as though it isn't connected to anything. It's just free in some wonderful way. And the woman is somehow attached to the world and to love and to people in a bondage that isn't a bondage. It's about being bound and not feeling bound.

Curtis Fox: That's a love poem in some way or another.

Kay Ryan: It is. And, you know, it's one of those things where he's just put fairy dust in our eyes because it's nuts, you know, it's just the goofiest trope I can imagine.

(RECORDING STARTS)

Robert Frost:
Silken Tent.

She is as in a field a silken tent
At midday when a sunny summer breeze
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,
So that in guys it gently sways at ease,
And its supporting central cedar pole
That is its pinnacle to heavenward
And signifies the sureness of the soul,
Seems to owe naught to any single cord,
But strictly held by none, is loosely bound
By countless silken ties of love and thought
To every thing on earth the compass round,
And only by one’s going slightly taut
In the capriciousness of summer air
Is of the slightest bondage made aware.

(RECORDING ENDS)

Kay Ryan: It's breathtaking what he gets away with. I mean, he's got this central cedar pole representing the sureness of the soul. I mean, I think it's just hokum, but it is glorious. You feel the tribute. You feel the love in this poem. It works. It works as a poem. And it's surely doesn't work as reason, as logic, as anything sensible.

Curtis Fox: Kay Ryan, thank you so much.

Kay Ryan: Oh, it's been my pleasure.

Curtis Fox: Kay Ryan's essay on Robert Frost is in the September issue of Poetry magazine. You can find a generous selection of poems by Robert Frost and by Kay Ryan on our website, poetryfoundation.org, where you can also, read features and poetry news and download about 80 previous podcasts. The audio of Robert Frost comes courtesy of The Voice of the Poet, a series of CDs and books edited by J.D. McClatchy and published by Random House Audio. The engineer at KQED was Howard Gelman, and we got production help this week from Owen Agnew. Let us know what you think of Poetry Off the Shelf, where our motto is…

Speaker: You should never explain the poem, but it always helps nevertheless. (LAUGH)

Curtis Fox: Email us at [email protected]. The music used in this program comes from Claudia Quintet. For Poetry Off the Shelf, I'm Curtis Fox. Thanks for listening.