Although the Poetry Foundation works to provide accurate audio transcripts, they may contain errors. If you find mistakes or omissions in this transcript, please contact us with details.

AL FILREIS:
I'm Al Filreis, and this is Poem Talk at the Writer's House, where I had the pleasure of convening three friends in the world of contemporary poetry and poetics to collaborate on a close but not too close reading of a poem. We'll talk, maybe even disagree a bit, maybe disagree a lot, and perhaps open up the verse to a few new possibilities, and we hope gain for a poem that interests us, some new readers and listeners. And I say listeners because Poem Talk poems are available in recordings made by the poets themselves as part of our PennSound archive, writing.upenn.edu/pennsound. Today I'm joined here in Philadelphia at the Kelly Writers House in our Wexler studio by Anna Strong Safford, poet, critic, editor, teacher, who teaches creative writing and modern contemporary US poetry and poetics, whose poems have appeared variously in Supplement, Cleaver, Peregrine and elsewhere, who is a curricular specialist and faculty member in the School of Liberal and Professional Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and is my close colleague here at the Kelly Writers House and in the teaching of poetry to tens of thousands of people worldwide through our ModPo course. And who with me is currently editing a book of 50 short essays by 50 poets, each about one poem, to be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, and possibly to be titled The Difference Is Spreading. And by Ahmad Almallah, a poet whose amazing first book of poems, Bitter English, has been published by the University of Chicago Press, who is also a specialist in Arabic poetry and has written a book about Arabic love poetry called Pure and Sensual, who is a member of the faculty here at Penn and in the Near East Languages and Civilizations Department, and also teaches in the Creative writing program. And whose new collection of poems in progress, Her Book of Recipes. Is that still the title?

AHMAD ALMALLAH:
No.

AL FILREIS:
What is it, you don't know?

AHMAD ALMALLAH:
I don't know.

AL FILREIS:
OK.

STEPHEN METCALF:
I don't know.

AL FILREIS:
Second Exile. What used to be called her book of recipes and might now be Second Exile is about in part. I hope it's still about this, the difficult, intergenerational, cross-cultural psychodynamics of parents and children. And by Stephen Metcalf, critic at large at Slate, who's beautifully written, beautifully beautifully written essays. And articles have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Observer, New York Magazine, and The New Yorker. Steve, there's a lot of New York in there, there's a lot in New York in there. And elsewhere who resides in the beautiful, beautiful Hudson Valley of New York State. He's a real New York guy who is finishing a book about the 1980s, whose Wikipedia page entry picture is a photograph of him presenting in our Arts café here at the Kelly Writers House, where indeed he has hosted discussions with great prose writers at least once per year, more typically twice for some years now. And who since 2007, I believe, has been the host of the much, much admired weekly Slate podcast, The Culture Gabfest.

Steve, it's good to see you all.

STEPHEN METCALF:
It's great to see you.

AL FILREIS:
I'm so glad you're back here.

STEPHEN METCALF:
I'm delighted to be back.

AL FILREIS:
I think this might be your first day in this studio, right? Last time we were upstairs.

STEPHEN METCALF:
Yeah, first day.

AL FILREIS:
Yeah. Fantastic. Ahmad.

AHMAD ALMALLAH:
Well, hello. It's always great to see you, Al. You know, this is my favorite place on Earth.

AL FILREIS:
Oh, my God. You're making.

AHMAD ALMALLAH:
I'm facing you right now. That's all what I need..

AL FILREIS:
Oh, you're the best. We're very excited. Let the record show that this evening. On the day of this recording, this evening, Ahmad will be reading from Bitter English and new poems. And by the time people are hearing this podcast, they will be able to go to his PennSound page and watch the recording and listening. And Anna, hello.

ANNA STRONG SAFFORD:
Hello.

AL FILREIS:
How are you?

ANNA STRONG SAFFORD:
I'm alright.

AL FILREIS:
Not better than that. OK. Well, today we four have gathered here to talk about one of the most well-known poems in English of the 20th century, Robert Frost's Mending Wall, first collected into a book in 1914 in the legendary volume North of Boston. Frost read this poem many, many times at readings and in studios across the decades. The poem is in our ears, at least in mine, mostly from performances by the older venerable poet reprising a famous piece. For our recording today, however, we go back to the very early years of poetry recording our Mending Wall which comes from PennSound's Frost Page as curated by Chris Mustazza, was the second earliest known recording of the poem made on October 24th, 1934. It was originally made on an aluminum platter as a speech lab recording at Columbia, Columbia University. Along with other speech lab recordings, it was subsequently dubbed to a reel to reel tape by the Library of Congress in 1978 to preserve it. And the sounds you will hear happen to come from that reel.

So here now is Robert Frost performing Mending Wall in 1934.

ROBERT FROST:
Mending Wall.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun;

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

The work of hunters is another thing:

I have come after them and made repair

Where they have left not one stone on a stone,

But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,

To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,

No one has seen them made or heard them made,

But at spring mending-time we find them there.

I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line

And set the wall between us once again.

We keep the wall between us as we go.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

And some are loaves and some so nearly balls

We have to use a spell to make them balance:

‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’

We wear our fingers rough with handling them.

Oh, just another kind of out-door game,

One on a side. It comes to little more:

There where it is we do not need the wall:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it

Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offense.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,

But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather

He said it for himself. I see him there

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me,

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

He will not go behind his father's saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

AL FILREIS:
Steve, there are at least three figures here. One is the speaker who's on one side of the wall, the other is the neighbor whom the speaker meets once a year at least. And the third who to stipulate is the person who created the poem, who either is the speaker or is more likely some other figure will call Robert Frost. So those are three. How did this, get us started on how those three relate to each other? And what does a reader do with those three figures?

STEPHEN METCALF:
That's a great question. I think the relationship between Frost and the speaker is a perfect place to start a discussion like this, because Frost, who we think of as a quintessential New Englander who was born in California, was born in San Francisco. Very quiet. And my lecturing already, I feel so. So I taught a class about Robert Frost recently, and I think of Frost as a poet who's greeted with skepticism. It's helpful to be reminded that Frost invented this caricature of himself. I mean, Robert Frost himself. Forget the discrepancy between the human being known as Robert Frost and the speaker in poems. Robert Frost himself was a very conscious belabored creation, right.

AL FILREIS:
So this is the gist of my question, because the guy on the other side who says good fences make good neighbors, doesn't think about what his father saying means is really, really New Englander. And then the guy, the speaker is a kind of somewhat skeptical, complicated intellectual New Englander, but really, really New Englander. And then the guy, Frost, who creates all this is something of a construction of a New Englander, but they all are construction. So I guess what I'm looking for is some starter on how we understand the relationship between Frost, the one who made the poem and who signed it and the speaker. How uncomfortable are those two with each other?

STEPHEN METCALF:
Uncomfortable might not be exactly the word that I would use. I mean, here.

AL FILREIS:
But they're not the same.

STEPHEN METCALF:
I would not say they're the same. And he wrote in it. So this is his second book of poetry. It's the first real poem, I think, in his second book of poetry, the first one being kind of an introductory jingle and then mending wall.

AL FILREIS:
You Come Too. You Come Too.

STEPHEN METCALF:
Exactly, pasture, whatever. And but if you go back and you read his first book of poetry, there's nothing precocious about Frost that's published when he's 38, he's a fully formed, grown up who's had several careers at that point. And you hear a very Victorian voice in a boy's will. And it's really a book of poetry about learning how to become an American poet, a distinctively American and distinctively modern poet.

AL FILREIS:
Interesting.

STEPHEN METCALF:
And having performed that work, he can now present himself or present this persona or, you know, some combination of the two in mending wall.

AL FILREIS:
Ahmad would take it from there, the relationship between Frost, the poet who, as Steve says, is sort of really getting into the mode of the construct itself that he worked out in a boy's will. And the speaker who is different, I think.

AHMAD ALMALLAH:
I think Frost is trying to be the guy from New England who's speaking to his neighbor, but at the same time, he wants to be the outsider. And he plays those roles very well in the poem, even for me, in the construction of the poem itself. I mean, the first line, something there is that doesn't love a wall. It almost seems to me like a construction of objects of like rocks. Like he begins that construction of the wall. And then he begins deconstructing that wall or falls. He doesn't know why he reflects on the gaps. And then he gets to this kind of meeting with the neighbor each on one side of the wall. And that's sort of like what sets the conversation, that wall becomes the conversation between them.

AL FILREIS:
Anna, if we were to be pro wall, like happy that the wall exists, it would be because it gives us an excuse to have a conversation, ritualistic conversation once a year, right? So nothing wrong with the wall that provides us an occasion for exploring subjectivities.

ANNA STRONG SAFFORD:
I guess. But like, I'd hope that you'd have other things to talk to your neighbors about besides. OK, there are rocks on your side and there's rocks on my side. So you fix your rock and I fix my rock and more.

AL FILREIS:
What if they don't? I mean, what if they don't? We live in a city, so it doesn't. You don't need walls to have a conversation with people because you're all around them. But there's a lack of social density here. I mean, I see this, Steve, as an expression of a kind of social conservatism, a smart social conservatism that suggests that one reason we need boundaries is to know where I end and where another person begins so we can meet there and explore what is not me and what is me. Does that make any sense to you?

STEPHEN METCALF:
It does. I mean, it's interesting that in the poem, you know, the speaker is mischievous in a way that can't provoke the neighbor to any mischief in response, right. It's the solidity and kind of relative.

AL FILREIS:
Right. He simply repeats what he knows.

STEPHEN METCALF:
Yeah. He repeats the bromide passed along to him by his own father, which becomes for the speaker of the poem, quite sinister, right. Provocatively sinister to him in a way. But the wall is needless. I mean, one of the things that makes him feel the wall is necessary to bring these two people together.

AL FILREIS:
But it's not necessary for agriculture.

STEPHEN METCALF:
Right. Absent the wall, they will not confront one another socially. I think you feel quite strongly.

AL FILREIS:
Let's go back to Anna, because so I guess the point is that the wall is not a utility, but it is needed for there to be social commerce.

ANNA STRONG SAFFORD:
In the economy of this poem, I'm willing to stipulate that.

AL FILREIS:
OK. But you'd rather. Come on. I'm trying to draw it out.

ANNA STRONG SAFFORD:
I know you are.

AL FILREIS:
You're saying that you'd rather there not need to be a wall for social commerce to take place? It’d be better if they met at the café and had a nice conversation.

ANNA STRONG SAFFORD:
Or, you know, the speaker could be a nice neighbor. A good neighbor isn't just a good fence, a good neighbor is someone who invites you over for coffee or whatever.

AL FILREIS:
This is the equivalent of that, isn't it? The conversation isn't very edifying, but they do have it.

ANNA STRONG SAFFORD:
Sure. I mean, rituals are an important thing. And I think part of the ritual of this poem is not only the story, right, the action of walking along the fence and each mending their own side, it's the fact that this is written in, you know, blank verse, right. That's another ritual that's been reproduced. The poem itself is this like dense block of words, Wordsworthian blank verse.

AL FILREIS:
It's blank, but not free, because it's very iambic.

ANNA STRONG SAFFORD:
Yeah. So it's that's another sort of ritual that people didn't question for a long time, right. Like, oh, that's just what poems are like, or just hanging out in unrhymed iambic pentameter because that's what poems do.

AL FILREIS:
Ahmad And Steve, I want to turn to you on this question. So what Anna is saying and a lot of people do say, she's speaking contemporary view of this poem, which is that it itself is a kind of wall.

AHMAD ALMALLAH:
Well, I mean, there's no indication in the poem that Frost is against the construct, really. I think he's all for it.

AL FILREIS:
Ironically, the speaker might not be all for it, but you're saying Frost.

AHMAD ALMALLAH:
Frost is definitely all for it.

AL FILREIS:
Yeah.

AHMAD ALMALLAH:
You know, Frost kept talking about the imagination of the ear and kind of fitting sort of that imagination within the conventional meters of English poetry. There's no doubt about it. He also talked about, OK, if you write without meter, then it's like playing tennis without a net or something.

AL FILREIS:
Which is not a good thing.

AHMAD ALMALLAH:
Which is not a good thing.

AL FILREIS:
Although I have really loved playing tennis without that. You really do want a net. I mean, he's got us there. You really do want a net when you're playing.

AHMAD ALMALLAH:
I guess. But for me, the imagination of the ear doesn't really have to be within the iambic pentameter or within iambic. For that, he tries to kind of use all the time.

AL FILREIS:
It's iambic pentameter.

AHMAD ALMALLAH:
It is iambic pentameter here. Yeah. Yeah.

AL FILREIS:
Set the wall between us once again. We keep the wall between us as we go to eat. So it's really iambic pentameter. Yeah. Steve, take it from there.

STEPHEN METCALF:
I'm not a prosodist by any stretch of the imagination, but my sense is that Frost, he goes in and out of iambic pentameter very much as a musical cue. He'll go from the very conversational register where you have a kind of crabbed or slightly unrhythmic speech, even though it may be in a ten syllable line. But then he'll go into a very poetic, very rhythmic and very lulling iambic pentameter to tell you that a moment that you're supposed to pay attention to is arrived. And in this poem, I really hear it, and on a day we meet to walk the line and set the wall between us once again. Setting the wall coincides, as you say, beautifully with this very self-conscious, poetic construction. So I think it's all very old fashioned to us now. It was of a piece with modernism in its own peculiar way back in 1950.

AL FILREIS:
Anna, Ahmad. If Steve is right and I think he is, that this is a hint, especially the first reception is a hint that there's a certain meta poetic quality here. I know there's Frost. I don't know about the speaker, but Frost is aware that he is creating a relationship between his prosody and the idea of the wall. That is a modern idea. I don't think of this poem as modernism, but that idea is quite modern. Responses to that.

ANNA STRONG SAFFORD:
Well, it would make sense. And Steve, I think your reading is absolutely right. Like something there is that doesn't love a wall is not iambic. Yeah. And interesting that the first, the opening, salvo opening line would not.

AL FILREIS:
It's impossible to do it. Although I can do it.

ANNA STRONG SAFFORD:
You can?

AL FILREIS:
I can try and do it using the voice of Bela Lugosi. Something there is that doesn't love a wall. Obviously it's not iambic, but Bela Lugosi could make it iambic.

ANNA STRONG SAFFORD:
Bela Lugosi can make anything look iambic.

AL FILREIS:
True. Bela Lugosi only spoke in iambs. Listen to the children of the night. That's actually anapestic, but anyway.

ANNA STRONG SAFFORD:
I guess all I was going to say is, if the wall were a perfect wall, right, maybe it would be completely in perfect iambs for the whole poem. But the wall is kind of broken, the whole purpose of this walk is to fix the wall. And isn't it true that. I could be wrong about who said this, but I think it's Wordsworth who said that he wrote in iambic pentameter to mimic the patterns of speech. I guess the idea then would be that the more conversational pieces would perhaps be in iambic parts to talk about the, you know, the broken wall, the falling down wall, or maybe where he breaks the pattern a little bit. But I think overwhelmingly, you get the sense that this is iamb. And if you feel the comfort in which it's almost like, you know, when you're putting in like a combination lock and you feel that really satisfying little click like when you get it right. When you read, and on a day we meet to walk the line and set, build the wall between us once again, we keep the wall between us a we go.

Like you fall right into it, so comfortable, right, So comfortable to say. So, that's a part where that wall is nice and tight.

AHMAD ALMALLAH:
But again, I guess that's where I would kind of disagree probably with Robert Frost, because I think the most interesting line is the first line.

ANNA STRONG SAFFORD:
Oh yeah.

AHMAD ALMALLAH:
Something there is that doesn't love a wall. I mean it's just.

AL FILREIS:
It's very mysterious because of course that something is the big question mark of this piece, right. Yes, it's elves, haha. Not elves, it's something, it's a mystery, it's nature. I mean the joke answer when you're teaching this poem is what is something? It's Frost that creates the upheaval of the stones. And that's a great pun on the person who created this whole situation. Steve I want to switch to the question of the neighbor, right. So we're to think at least superficially, oh, this guy doesn't think about anything. He moves in darkness. He's really behind the times. What kind of freethinking philosophical farmer is he? Well, he's not, right. So there's a little bit of gentrification, you know, there's a little bit of the speaker, the Frostian speaker kind of just showing up and saying, you're going to fix this wall. I got to deal with this guy. But I guess it's a way of finding out, you know, what the benighted people are about. Can we do something with that as a critique?

STEPHEN METCALF:
Well, there are class issues and gender issues, and we can separate them. I mean, as a class issue, Frost was always conscious that he was not a farmer, even though he was a farmer. I mean, sort of half a farmer and half not a farmer. He was both of and not really in, but not really of the New England landscape. And many of his poems about farming are about being lazy, about indulging in leisure and trying to understand whether poetry is a fact of human labor, of work and necessity or frivolity at leisure, you know, superfluity and trying to reconcile those two things with one another which brings up the issue of gender. You know, his wife was slightly older than he was and a very gifted poet, and I think was valid Victorian of her high school class. And he was salutatorian or something. And then submitted herself to 40 years or 60 years or whatever it was of being creatively throttled by her husband in a way. And there is something about Frost working out the idea of what an American poet will look like, a masculine American poet will look like.

And for that to work in the context of the American landscape, poetry has to be a form of work. There is a way in which maybe he envies the neighbor for being a creature purely of masculine labor in a way, laconic self-expression.

AL FILREIS:
If so, Anna, there's a lot of anxiety here on the part of the speaker because it's the, because the real masculine is the, character is the guy on the other side. He's a savage. Right. Which is a cruel word, but also a word that's infused with masculinity in a way that the much too intellectual speaker isn't. So there's some anxiety in this on the part of the speaker. I have and you have witnessed my teaching this poem, Anna, maybe too many times. Has a really interesting analog for subject, object. Subject the speaker vocalize are on one side and object being the person on the other side, you see, but also writer reader. Right. I mean, I really think that it's kind of almost an allegory for modern reading. Speaker is to neighbor as subject is to object. The wall happily for a cultural conservative separate subject from object. The worst thing you can have happen if you're a cultural conservative or literary conservative is to have the wall is to play tennis without a net with subjectivities.

You don't want the other, the subjectivity of one to invade the other. So you want it, the wall helps us define our relationship, and you need a wall to do it. Right. So it becomes a kind of, I don't know whether Frost meant this or but it comes a kind of analogue for the whole big question of modern subjectivity. There's that. And that's where the whole modern ethos of wall building comes in, because it becomes a geopolitical thing. This is a New England wall that doesn't serve a purpose. It's not keeping the East Germans out. It's not keeping the Palestinians out. But it is a wall in the 20th century. So we can't help but talk about that.

ANNA STRONG SAFFORD:
I think so much of the poetry of the 20th century that's also occupying the same moment of like the early teens and twenties poetry that sort of flirting with. Well, can we think about expression in a different way? Can we make it new to use Ezra Pound's famous phrase? Can we not think about subject object relations like in the same way that so many people thought about it before? I think, what some of those poets are doing is considering the formal qualities of the poems that they're writing, that they should have an explicit non-formal in the sense of using a form like I'm a pentameter blank verse or, you know, ballads or whatever. That the form of the poem should be commensurate with its subject material in a new and different and interesting way. And I think this poem is rebuilding or staking a case or making a claim for, well, there needs to be something. It can't just be this open, free, you know. We had little poems about wheelbarrows, right. Like it can't. There has to be something there.

There has to be something to establish me as speaking subject and this as speaking object. Like I'm creating a poetic self. I'm speaking from a particular point of view, and I'm establishing that in my poem. And I'm using the trappings of literary history as a vehicle to then kind of get that across to you and say something about this important subject.

AL FILREIS:
I'm excited because this is really what I was hoping we would talk about. This is big stuff, Steve and then Ahmad.

STEPHEN METCALF:
Well, and the interesting thing about that, I think, is that I and you are not for Frost pre-given stable categories, they become stabilized in the course of the poem. He famously said poem at best is a momentary stay against confusion. He was a chaotic human being. You read his biography, it's almost terrifying how. I mean, I honestly think, clinically he would be described as bipolar. I mean, I think mental chaos and a sense of social chaos were both really quite powerful in his mind and temper and then very fearful. And if you don't find arbitrary limits and boundaries and if you don't impose rhythm on speech, if you don't erect some boundary or establish some boundary between I and you, the two do chaotically blend into one another.

AHMAD ALMALLAH:
I don't know. I feel that in line with the creation of the United States as a colony, Frost kind of acts in line with that mentality. I mean, the wall to the geography of the place is very, very fine, it's something that was never there. The creation of these walls and these farms and the bringing of the sheep has just changed the entire landscape of this region. So despite the fact that Frost kind of try to act like as though he's the outsider, he's kind of like shaking up the idea of the wall in at least the neighbor's head, he actually speaks for the idea of the wall and he speaks really for himself as a person who actually occupies this and needs this wall just as he constructs it also in his home. I think the more difficult task is to construct the poem out of no form. That's really daunting. That's to to use no structures, no walls, no something and to construct something, that's real innovation. And I think he does it in his first line, interestingly enough.

AL FILREIS:
Yeah, that's great. So which is the landscape rejecting the wall, right.

AHMAD ALMALLAH:
Yeah, the landscape itself is rejecting the wall.

AL FILREIS:
You said so many really great things. The last thing you said is the one I want to pick up and ask Anna and Steve to respond to. So that it's one thing for us to critique this early 20th century, possibly not conscious replication of boundaries that are themselves not natural, that are imposed, and to create a form that is commensurate with boundary ness, which is done so brilliantly. It's another thing to, it's one thing to criticize that, it's another to imagine the opposite, which is a poem that is so non wallish that it doesn't reproduce any of those problems. What do you think? I'm not asking you to create such a poem or even to identify such a poem, but I am asking you to think about. I am asking you to think about what that means for a poetry that would stand against this imposition on the land, which Ahmad is correctly saying is a US or American imposition. So it's a challenge, isn't it?

ANNA STRONG SAFFORD:
Yeah. No. He said it so remarkable. So I'm thinking about the ways in which walls themselves are. You know, you look at like an old wall like this, like in New England or an old fence and you go, oh, man, that's been there forever, how cool is that. Like, look at this old wall. Like, look at the old Roman aqueducts, like the old Roman roads everywhere in Europe. And you see this stuff and you're like, oh, this is so cool, it's so old, it's been there for so long. But it's not, right, it's a fiction. You know, these things are not native to the landscape. The one little piece of research that I did before this Poem Talk, I can confess. I started thinking about the Enclosure Acts in England, the actual legal precedent that created private property rights in England, that took land that was common and made it privately held. And the last Enclosure Act I found was an act in 1914. So there's a nice little, maybe Frost is thinking about that. He spent some time in England, right?

AL FILREIS:
Oh, yeah.

ANNA STRONG SAFFORD:
Yeah. Think for a little bit. So he would have seen this, right? Like in England, there's all these lovely farms that are separated by these walls and there's like little pass in between so people can walk, you know, around the farm and go to town to go to the pub or wherever they go. And this poem to me just kind of is the poem that tries to make a case for this wall has been here forever, this wall is so important. We have to preserve the wall. We have to preserve the separation. We have to preserve private property. Private property is important, but like private properties theft. And this land probably was alright, in fact, we know was held commonly by a whole bunch of people for a whole long time before Robert Frost ever, like, landed on top of it.

ROBERT FROST:
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill, and on a day we meet to walk the line and set the wall between us once again. We keep the wall between us as we go, to each the boulders that have fallen to each. And some are loaves and some so nearly balls, we have to use a spell to make them balance. Stay where you are until our backs are turned. We wear our fingers rough with handling them. Oh, just another kind of out-door game, one on a side, it comes to little more. There where it is we do not need the wall. He is all pine and I am apple orchard. My apple trees will never get across and eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. He only says, ‘good fences make good neighbors.'

AL FILREIS:
Well, I mean, I've been assuming, I've been using the phrase cultural conservatism. I've been thinking a lot about this. I wrote a book about the 1950s in which I was very interested in reading cultural conservatives that would have been Cold Warriors who were against a whole lot of things I was interested in, including modernism. And I had to read them with respect. I mean, you have to, you have to read someone you don't agree with as much respect as possible. I've always read Frost with respect. I do believe it's quite a brilliant, effective conservative argument about the need for boundaries. So I want you to, if that's not the reading, give us.

STEPHEN METCALF:
I just, I don't think that it's possible to say that whoever wrote this poem is obviously on the side of erected boundaries. I really don't. I think that upswell of the frozen earth is as much a part of the energy of the poem and the creative, you know, urge behind the poem, as is any act of speech or, you know, or self-definition.

AL FILREIS:
So why do we read it otherwise? It's not just an interpretive mistake.

STEPHEN METCALF:
Well, I'll tell you. So it's interesting that the wall is nonfunctional in some respect. It doesn't keep livestock from wandering off. But it is functional in another sense, which you alluded to, is that it's a property boundary. And what happens when the property boundary between what I own and what your neighbor farmer owns erodes? And you can look at Frost's career, he's so self-conscious of wanting to create a persona that he could bring to Marketplace. He did not want to be a quote unquote poet for the few, and the sense of turning his own person into a piece of intellectual property that he owned the rights to, you know, and retained the rights to. And that was lucrative, was so central to his life project, in a way. And yet there's this funny thing that he so there's that sense of containment. I own it, I read it, I set it, I created it. You have to pay me to come and speak it. And that was a huge part of his revenues. He was the Malcolm Gladwell of his time. You want me to show up at Amherst?

You know, I mean, it was poet dollars.

AL FILREIS:
It's meta poetic in that sense, too then. It is kind of, it's a piece of early piece about what he owns, Frost.

STEPHEN METCALF:
I'd rather, but I'd rather he said it for himself, which is of a piece with Al Filreis non fascist pedagogy as it comes.

AL FILREIS:
Or my saying that this poem is about writer reader as well, or reader listener, you know.

STEPHEN METCALF:
Well, there's the restrictive self containing gesture that's totally selfish, right, like totally on a property, intellectual property basis, completely selfish and retentive. And then there's this other gesture that's incredibly open and has to do with this is sort of your property as the reader. And I want whatever happens, I want you to have created as the reader as well. And I think both things are going on dialectically in the poem.

AL FILREIS:
Ahmad says, I'd rather. Steve quoted it, I'd rather he said it for himself. He's not saying you must say it for yourself. But he's writing the poem. So he does get to. He's in charge, but he's really in charge. I'd rather he said it for himself. But there's no such thing as the guy on the other side. I mean, it's a poem, right. It's a poem. So you have a speaker who's inventing, possibly even another, a version of himself. You know, people have read it that way.

AHMAD ALMALLAH:
Possibly, I mean, it's a poem. And I don't, you know, I didn't want to sound like I'm anti Frost. We can probably make the statement that I made about Frost because as Steve said, he created this kind of Frost presence that was so important to him and that was really for him, everything about his existence. And he guarded it in insane ways. I mean, reading like his biography, there was one time, this was at the bread loaf when someone else was reading at the bread loaf. And the people were really, really kind of enamored with the reader, and he started a fire somewhere.

AL FILREIS:
Yeah, he lit some papers off fire.

AHMAD ALMALLAH:
Yeah, yeah.

AL FILREIS:
He couldn't take it.

AHMAD ALMALLAH:
He just couldn't really take the fact that someone else is reading good poetry beside him. And he, you know, as Steve said, he wanted this to be the source of his income. He wanted to be called to places and get paid. And he created this Frost world. It kind of fit with this idea of this poem of, you know, I want to create something. I want a garden. I want to set kind of boundaries around it. But there's you know, there's no way of downplaying like even the genius of Frost. My role here is to kind of criticize it, like find some gaps in and there.

AL FILREIS:
Gaps. Oh, that's so funny.

AHMAD ALMALLAH:
Nicely done.

AL FILREIS:
Yeah, nicely done, well, listen, look for me an important poem, and I teach this poem all the time. An important poem is a poem that gets us to say things like, this poem is about the poet's construction of a successful poetic self. Or this is a poem that makes us think about how walls of round rocks, which are probably originally from the streams, are up from the ground, which would be glacial, are kind of original. But then, oh, wait a minute, the claim of originality is not true. This is a poem that's about subject and object. This is a poem about cultural conservatism. I mean, this poem is doing a lot of work, and Frost would have been the first one to laugh at us for thinking that it's anything but a poem about a neighbor and your ritual. Look, we could talk forever about this. What I'd like you to do is each of you, one final thought. Something you came here today to say and didn't have a chance to yet. So final thought, Anna, what do you got?

ANNA STRONG SAFFORD:
I've been continuing to think about your question of is this poem about the relationship between a writer and a reader or maybe a speaker and a reader, given that we have like two layers of separation potentially between us and Frost, given that there's this like layer of the kind of Frost and persona speaker in between. And I guess if this poem is about the relationship between the writer and the reader, then the only sort of figure that the reader has to kind of hang their hat on is the figure of the neighbor, right. Like maybe the neighbor kind of stands in for us. And if that's the case, then the only thing that we quote unquote, we get to say in this whole poem is good fences make good neighbors because we have to sort of occupy that space. That's the only thing the neighbor actually says in the poem. And it's not even a quote, go back to originality, an original thought, because the neighbor is quoting his father, right. So if that is the case, then I would so much rather, as a reader have the poem that is the gapped fence, than the mended fence.

I want to be able to contribute a little bit more than this trait, good fences make good neighbors phrase. I want the poem that leaves space. I want the poem that does something with the space that's been left, that looks at this broken fence, not as something that needs to be fixed, but as opportunity, but as an ability to maybe say something different or say something new or break the ritual, right. I've nothing against rituals but the mending wall could, instead of being a poem of mending the wall and restoring iambic pentameter blank verse to its rightful place in the Western literary canon, maybe then it's a poem about a fence that's broken down instead. That's all I'll say.

AL FILREIS:
No, well said, you know, really, you know, really a modernist statement, what you just said. Well, leave it to us or the university to take a supposition, which is the analogy that it's an allegory for writer reader, then complain about the situation of the reader.

ANNA STRONG SAFFORD:
Listen, you invited me here.

AL FILREIS:
Alright. OK, great. Ahmad final thought.

AHMAD ALMALLAH:
I think Frost kind of, you know, wanted to kind of co-opt the American poetry scene to himself in a way. And it's kind of, it's funny to me to read the Pulitzer Prize letter that finally they said, OK, we're not going to give it to Frost again, and we're going to give it to Gwendolyn Brooks. And it's almost you know, it's almost apologetic. Like it's almost apologizing for giving it to Gwendolyn Brooks and saying that who, the one that really deserves it is the true American poet, Robert Frost. But there is this other person that we should probably consider. Frost has won, you know, four or five times before. And then there's, at the end of the letter, there's this kind of like a mention of Williams. And so it's kind of funny how this poem in a way, kind of fits into this persona that Frost really works so hard to construct all his life. And that's all what I have to say.

AL FILREIS:
I'm glad it's getting kind of, it's getting more gaps right now and that there is more space to play with the poem more and more. I think that's great. I don't know. Well said. Thank you. Steve.

STEPHEN METCALF:
Well, I think that that persona was just, became repulsive as it congealed over time in the fact that the American poetry establishment was so happy to elevate Frost over and over and over again was just criminal. But that was so many decades after this. And when teaching Frost, I'm just trying so hard to recover the atmosphere of 1905, 1910, 1914, the fact that Frost existed until practically the age of 40, completely outside of the literary establishment. I mean, till the point where he had published nothing, quite literally nothing, nobody knew who he was. And then he meets Ezra Pound. And he's, in fact, the modernist, the great modernist, you know, Svengali, who brings them almost overnight into literary history, because he see something new in what Frost is doing. And so strange that he has to give it to Edward Thomas and ask him, is this poetry? Right. So that we think of it as singsong in Victorian is an artifact of our own time. And then the only other thing I would say is that I think among the truly great takes on Robert Frost is this pale fire by Nabokov, which, the more I read it, the more I reread it.

Even though Shade is clearly explicitly not Frost, Shade has a relationship too, for reputational relationship to Frost that Kinbote makes clear to the reader. Nabokov was obsessed with the idea of a poet who hadn't been estranged from his own native language. You know, here's Nabokov completely in a new landscape, completely exiled from his own mother tongue in which he wanted to be a poet, not a novelist. Principally a poet and not a novelist. And that feeling of being orphaned and exiled is so powerful in him. And he has this kind of longing and also sort of bitter hatred for Frost's ability to have his mother tongue and express himself the total economy. And so he's endlessly thinking about what's preposterous about Frost and Frost's reputation through the figures of Kinbote and Shade. And I think this is a wonderfully oblique, weird way into what Frost came to mean in the mid-century.

AL FILREIS:
Pale fire. If we read Frost through pale fire, we get a new frost. Well, my final thought is to focus on two lines that I think most people who have a passing familiarity, mending wall, they might know the first line, but they will know this scent end, good fences make good neighbors. So number three on the list is before I built a wall, I'd to ask to know what I was walling in or walling out. Everybody knows that part. Now that part is a critique of walls. That is the part that most people think is the main idea of the poem, which is we need to ask about boundaries. We need to question what's the point. And most walls that have been built, and I don't mean a wall separating New England farms. I mean, you know, the walls that keep people out politically and so forth, more directly, more explicitly, are to keep, they're walling out, walling out but don't walling in. That is they're constructed by the in to keep the out from getting in. That's not what this is. And so I think it's worth focusing on those lines which are a sincere conviction of the modernist farmer speaker or the modern farmer speaker saying, well we need to think about this even though the ritual is important because it creates a social density that is lacking otherwise.

Well, we like to end Poem Talk with a minute or two of gathering paradise, which is a chance for us to spread wide our own narrow hands, to gather a little something really poetically good to hail or commend someone or something going on in the poetry world. And it doesn't have to be poetry, it can be anything. So, Anna, can you gather some paradise?

ANNA STRONG SAFFORD:
Some paradise I'd like to cheer for, Nasser Hussain's relatively recent book from 2018 called Sky Writings, in which he has sourced all of the available language for his poems from three letter airport codes. And has written all the poems using those three letter. Like Sky writings is W-R-I-T-E-I-N-G-S is the title. And so he's only use airport codes, and each poem, he then on the verso page has a little map of what would be your flight path if you actually flew the path through this poem. So in the interest of know walls, Sky Writings by Nasser Hussain.

AL FILREIS:
There you go. I'm hearing John Lennon's Imagine. Imagine there is no walls. It's easy if you try.

ANNA STRONG SAFFORD:
Yeah. And if you fly.

AL FILREIS:
Not. And if you fly, but if you're not sure, he's saying, you're probably going to get stopped at checkpoints. And that's the whole point. That is the whole point.

ANNA STRONG SAFFORD:
That's a great book.

AL FILREIS:
Steve.

STEPHEN METCALF:
So this is not a work of poetry, but it's a work by a poet, Patricia Lockwood, whose poetry I have no feelings about not having read it. But her criticism is getting really like confident in this way that's just kind of amazing to watch and listen to. Her own critical voices really come in writing for the London Review of Books. And they tasked her with writing about John Updike, and she just brung it. And then she brung it, like, I mean, just every paragraph.

ANNA STRONG SAFFORD:
It's the best book review I've ever read.

STEPHEN METCALF:
Yeah. I mean, it's like a young feminist poet confronting the mid-century phallic craft and kind of on his turf, but bringing him over to her turf. And it's just a rhetorical tour de force. It's an incredible piece of writing. And I really, I can't do it just as describing it. So just go to the London Review Books and read it. I mean, we're all trying to understand how to deal with Mailer, Roth, Updike and and Bellow, and whether or not we should just let them drift off into obscurity in total, you know, just forget them completely or whether to keep them alive. And if so, how? And that she found some incredible way to do it.

AL FILREIS:
Great recommendations. Thank you, Steve Ahmad.

AHMAD ALMALLAH:
I'm going to recommend the Time that Remains. It's a wonderful movie about the, you know, the crazy situation in Palestine. I think like it's such a good movie to watch related to this conversation and to the conversations of walls and the creation of boundaries. And it's available on Netflix. It's not a documentary, it's just a wonderful feature film. So the Time that Remains.

AL FILREIS:
Fantastic recommendation. My gather in paradise is I'm holding in my hand. Let the record show Bitter English by Ahmad Almallah. It's published by University of Chicago Press and it's great and you should buy a copy if you're hearing this and you don't already own one. I specifically want to shout out to a poem called Into His Own, which is about some of the things we were talking about today. It's really about the poet's father who is Palestinian and who has been sending some weird messages and texts and so forth. And the poet son is in the United States and he's just thinking about maybe he can become the kind of poet who can write in a way that the father won't understand. So I wondered if you would be, well, I was going to read it, part of it. But I wonder if you would be willing to read some lines of the end of this poem. Ahmad, sorry, we didn't prepare this.

AHMAD ALMALLAH:
Who are you? Why am I incapable of empathy? It's the past we've shared the motherly, as in the garden, as in the weeds, you used to rip from Earth and ground harshly, as in the slaps you gave me for nothing. That a child can understand and you remain this fog of explanations to me. I don't understand the structure of your disaster. And I know I've gotten much from you restless in every state. Do I love the land as much as you do? I keep digging, finding shards of broken glass, a piece of a stocking. Things that are fine to the touch and cutting something of shame. Maybe a sham. And maybe I am as unaware of you as you are unaware of me. An image of troubled trouble. Some kid you came close to taming but never did.

AL FILREIS:
Ahmad Almallah. And it's called Into his Own. Thank you. Well, that's all the father's saying. We have time for a Poem Talk today. Poem Talk at the Writers House is a collaboration of the Center for Programs and Contemporary Writing, the Kelley Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania and the Poetry Foundation. Poetryfoundation.org. Thanks so much to my guests. Anna Strong Safford, Ahmad Almallah, Steve Metcalf and Poem Talks Director and engineer today, Zach Carduner. And to Poem Talks editor, the same amazing Zach Carduner. And a shout out to Nathan and Elizabeth Light for their very generous support of Poem Talk. In our next episode, I will host Billy Joe Harris, Tyrone Williams, Alan Neilson and Erica Hunt in a discussion of Erica Hunt's poem, Should You Find Me? This is Al Filreis and I hope you'll join us for that or another episode of Poem Talk.