Frosted Tips

Okay, let's be honest. The Notebooks of Robert Frost isn't (aren't?) a piece of cake. It's not bathroom literature, nor does one read it casually. You can't read it straight through, at least I can't, and large portions of it don't make the slightest sense if you're skipping around.

All that being said, I'm glad it's on my shelf generally, and, more recently, in my hands. First off, I'm a big fan of the introduction. Yes, it may sound silly, but without it, there wouldn't be any reason to pick up the notebooks. Given Frost's opaque and obscure writing, it would be largely unintelligible to the layman, and completely unintelligible to the average village idiot, myself possibly included. For instance,

As Frost puruses his meditation on 'gossip,' he makes casual reference to another ancient wise saying, ;Good fences make good neighbors.' This line in "Mending Wall" isusually quoted as Frost's invention, although in these notebooks he says otherwise. The poem's famour competeing maxim, 'Something there is that doesn't love a wall' is usually quoted without reference to the other line. Both those sayings play off of a remarkable proverb in an earlier poem, "The Tuft of Flowers": 'Men work together I tell him from the heart / Whether they work together or apart.'

That small passage illuminated a phrase often bandied about in today's debate about immigration and was part of a deeper discussion of Frost's epigrammatic style and nature. Extremely thought-provoking, both in its broad questions (What makes a writer epigrammatic, particularly since so many memorable and beloved poets and authors never acquired the skill?) and particular (Will I ever write an epigram? Will I ever write an epitaph? Will I have an epitaph? Will it be as boring as the epitaph gracing the grave of the first Lee, the Lee whose seventh generational descendant was the famous Robert E.?). We owe a debt of gratitude (about sixty-four cents or so) to Robert Faggen, who edited the notebooks and authored the intro.

The notebooks themselves, though, are fun to page through, intelligibility be damned.

My name is Christopher Columbus
I cant be moved by all this rumpus
Put up your knives and go below
We're members of the O.Hi.O.

Bob Frost. Inscrutable, but entertaining. More thoughts as they come to me while browsing through this beast of a book.