Matt's Own Favorites - Wal Mart Blues

Sorry it took me a few days to post another one of my own favorite poems. A few weeks of work travel just came to an end and it was so refreshing to sleep in my own bed last night. But back to the matter at hand. I honestly don't hold a massive grudge against Wal-Mart. It's a successful corporation providing a service to communities, in fact it provides a plethora of services. My beef with Wal-Mart is that I like small town shops. Yes, I know the conveinience of one stop shopping is ideal for many people, myself included sometimes. And yes, I know Wal-Mart employs elderly and handicapped people as greeters at their stores. But how can you walk down the ruins of any main street in any small town in our country and not long for the personal touches of family owned businesses of yesteryear. Am I waxing poetic, damn right I am. In a perfect world, the large corporations, such as Wal-Mart, would genuinely embrace the sincerity and passion of small town shop owners, not meagerly try to replicate it through emotional ploys. My views could be a desperate attempt to return to a nostalgic view of our communities and towns that has long been outmoded and outdated by, among other things, technological advances. Writing this poem was about not apologizing for being nostalgic and, of course, about poking fun at Wal-Mart, an all-American company who essentially swallowed up the industries of whole American towns to become the juggernaut it has become. How can you not laugh at the fact that you can buy your groceries, winter coat, hunting rifle, computer, and get your nails done or go to your eye doctor all in the same store? Tell me that is not comical and vaguely communistic. And it only seemed natural that this poem about modern American consumerism would also take on a uniquely American form: the blues. Is there anything about Wal-Mart that indicates it would have soul, that it would know the depths of sorrow required to compose and sing a good blues song? Absolutely not (and if you disagree with this answer, well, then I'd love to take a walk down the gleaming aisles of Wal-Mart with you). A key aspect of this poem was setting the topic against the tone against the form. Everything in this poem had to be at odds with each other, yet it all had to operate within a specific and measured form. I love that controlled chaos. I love the emphasis on images. I love that I was able to write a poem that I read and couldn't help but chuckle.



WAL-MART BLUES

Hardly super---Wal-Mart,
sea of messy consumers,
harbor of loaded carts,

you chewed every store
in your culture-swallowing path
and now---you’re a profit whore:

obese, open all the time,
unzipped, unbuttoned,
nothing about you rhymes.

Canned Peaches, aisle six.
Hunting Rifles, aisle fifteen.
Sheets on special, aisle eleven.

Wal-Mart, I want to erase you
like a squiggle of lines
on an etch-a-sketch---but

you’ve even found a way
to mass produce irony,
profit driven, of course:

I’d have to buy

the etch-a-sketch from you
just to get rid of you.

---First appeared in Redivider Vol 4, Issue 2, Spring 2007

Matt's Own Favorites - Picture Of My Grandfather At War

I've become a big fan of pictures---looking at them, taking them, and, yes, even posing for them. I'm sure my mom would contend that last little bit, but I'm fairly sure I've learned the value of pictures. Viewing my parents, grandparents, and greatgrandparents (not to mention myself!) at different stages in life is magical. Seeing them at times and ages that I'm passing through or have recently passed through allows me to draw valuable corollaries. Not being alive for many of these pictures, my perspective of these people I love pre-me is a strange and unquantifiable thing. A few years back my mom was going through some boxes of photos from her dad's days in the Marines and the Korean War. I joined in the sorting of these pictures and found one of my grandfather in Korea rising from the hatch of one of the tanks he worked on. On his boyish face was a bad attempt at a goatee. He looked so young and then I realized that he was younger than me. I was in my early/mid twenties, but he was younger than me in that picture. He was at war and he was younger than I was. This realization sent shock waves through my body. I thought my stresses were difficult, but I was wrong. The picture stuck with me and, like a seed, planted itself in my mind. Over the next day or so I loosely fictionalized my grandfather's life, taking elements from both of my grandfathers' military experiences to create the character in this poem. I also took elements of their great loves with my grandmothers and elements of their shared hometown of Chicago to texture the poem with a setting and story. It was challenging to write a family history that loosely stuck to the facts, choosing frequently to steer off course for the sake of the poem's story. In the end, I'm proud of this poem for a few key reasons: I gave it to my grandfather and he read it; I created a story within the tight constructs of family and history; I revised this poem until every word was necessary, causing the whole poem to reflect a craftsmanship and concision I wish for all my poems.





PICTURE OF MY GRANDFATHER AT WAR




He’s too young to have this firearm
holstered to his waist. At boot camp,
they told him when to run and puke
and crap until he was Semper Fi,
breaking the boy but not his blue eyes,
clear enough to see through, back
to jumping turnstiles at Chicago Stadium
to watch the Golden Gloves, shiny boxers
toeing canvas, bruising under hot lights.

A letter peeks from his shirt pocket
and I wonder if its white lines are worn
with my grandmother’s loopy script,
and if after each letter he remembered
sweaty nights on the south side
throwing stones at her windows
until she snuck down to take tulips
he’d picked, and send him off with a kiss,
sticky lipped, sweet with berry juices.

In this fuzzy edged picture, he pops
from the hatch on one of the tanks
he repaired to load artillery shells.
Shrapnel will slice his torso and legs
leaving fleshy spider webbed scars.
I rotate the picture; nothing changes.
My grandfather, younger than me,
smirks and dreams of outlasting
the black and white that’s captured him.

---Matthew Kaberline

First appeared in Tar River Poetry, Vol 45, Number 2, Spring 2006

Matt's Own Favorites - Walt Whitman Rest Stop

Sources of inspiration are varied, unpredictable, and and odd, at least this has been my experience. Driving from Boston to Washington DC about 4 years ago, I was speeding along the Jersey Turnpike making fairly good time. I had been holding it for close to an hour and really needed a rest stop to use the facilities, but for some reason I had passed two perfectly good rest stops. It was as if I was testing myself, pushing the limits to see just how far I could go. I do not recommend this, especially for anyone who's not had their bladders fortified by years of car trips (as I had as a child). The waiting, in this case, was fated; I pulled off into a rest stop bearing the name of the immortal American Poet Walt Whitman. New Jersey has the dubious distinction of rest stops named after noteworthy New Jerseyans. I think my initial thought was something like this: I wonder if Clara Barton was founding the Red Cross and hoping to herself that someday she'd have a rest stop in New Jersey named for her. Obviously this is meant to contain ample amounts of sarcasm and mocking. But it was only natural to ask what Walt Whitman would think of his rest stop? And as I stopped, I noticed the stores, the people, the products, and the food. I noticed bits of Walt in all of these, but I also noticed the antithesis of Walt in them. Eventually, the negatives outweighed the positives and I truly saw this distinction as utterly ridiculous. New Jersey couldn't have named a library or town hall after Walt (actually, upon further research there are a great deal of places and things named after Whitman in NJ). I remember running from the rest stop to my car and pulling out a pen and paper to start the first draft of this poem. The first draft was far different than the one you see here, but this was a poem that came remarkably easy. It was a poem that in many ways, even in revision, seemed to write itself.

Why is this poem one of my favorites that I've written? It's overwhelmingly ambitious, like Walt Whitman. The poem addresses Walt and examines the cultural changes in our country since he lived. The poem utilizes repetition and sound in a similar manner to Walt's writing style. Finally, the poem underscores the hillarious modern honor of having a rest stop named after you. Decide for yourself if you like the poem or not, but this poem and the whole process of writing it still resonates with me and that is why it's one of my favorites.



WALT WHITMAN REST STOP


Father of American Poetry, your brilliance
won you a rest stop in New Jersey.
Bureaucrats praised your spirit, then hung you
between the bathrooms---fuzzy picture
and eight lines from Song of Myself
separating the quarter twist dispensers:
men’s room licorice flavored condoms
and women’s room Tylenol and tampons.

Gray beard, straw flop on your head, smile blurred
by photo’s age---to travelers shuffling through
you’re a mystic grandpa, rolling pant legs high
in all weather. They wouldn’t be far off.
After daylong walks across fields
abandoned by farmers who bloodied themselves
in the brotherly war, you picked out what stuck
in your boot soles, and from that retread you sang
yourself electric and our country alive,
assembling life rhythm-by-rhythm, line-by-line.

But here, along the Jersey Pike, people stop
to crisscross your food court---the grease glazed oasis
of Sbarro, Cinnabon, and Roy Rogers.
They can’t get past the shadows you wear
comfortably, like a gypsy. If only they wondered
who you’d be. Trucker at the coffee counter
stuffing his mouth with jelly filled donuts?
Goof digging in linty pockets for change
to feed the love machine ready to label him
something between scorching and stud muffin?

Oh Walt, you’d be the bicycle rider appalled
by the modern wilderness of the highway,
where car horns and rumble strips overwhelm
our songs. It may be true that taillights burn out
more frequently than people read poetry,
but you have a rest stop. For you, there’s no chance
of returning to history’s obscurity, of becoming
a name on a building waiting to be renamed.

---Matthew Kaberline

What I learned from this experiment...

National Poetry Month has come and gone. It would be cliched to say that the month went by in a flash, but cliches are used for a reason: they're undeniably true. April was my busiest month at work, a busy month with travel, and a busy month of writing. This month I relayed for life, I traveled in New Jersey for work, I saw my cousin get married in Illinois, I went to a writing workshop, commemorated the one year anniversary of the Virginia Tech tragedy, and did countless other things. Most importantly, I shared one of my favorite poems with all of you each night. The essays I wrote about these poems were not work; they were an exercise in centering myself. Each day as I sat down to post a new blog entry I was reminded, through this process, of the things I value and the travesty of easing them into the peripheries of my life. I preached in previous blog entries about how these poems spoke to me. I'm not delusional; I realize these poems will not speak to each of you. My hope was that through my words you would feel and see a glimmer of the poem's magic. And from this spark, you just might want to read the poem again, or explore more poems and poets. If that happened---well, then I guess my goals were achieved.

There have been questions about if I will keep this blog going even though national poetry month is over. I'm contemplating the idea and have yet to come to a conclusion. I'd like to continue it, but I'm not sure I have enough favorite poems to last every day of the year. I might have to wait and make this an annual endeavor for April of every year. We'll see. But in the meantime, I did promise to post some of my own poems on this blog, mainly because you asked me too---well, my biggest fan asked me to and how can you say no to your mom. I'll start with a poem of my own and a brief essay this coming Monday, May 5. This should continue for a week (possibly longer if I find enough poems of mine that I believe suitable for public consumption).

Thank you for reading, thank you for commenting, and thank you for taking a few minutes out of your day to embrace poetry.

All the best
Matthew Kaberline

B.H. Fairchild - Body And Soul

BODY AND SOUL


Half-numb, guzzling bourbon and Coke from coffee mugs,
our fathers fall in love with their own stories, nuzzling
the facts but mauling the truth, and my friend’s father begins
to lay out with the slow ease of a blues ballad a story
about sandlot baseball in Commerce, Oklahoma decades ago.
These were men’s teams, grown men, some in their thirties
and forties who worked together in zinc mines or on oil rigs,
sweat and khaki and long beers after work, steel guitar music
whanging in their ears, little white rent houses to return to
where their wives complained about money and broken Kenmores
and then said the hell with it and sang Body and Soul
in the bathtub and later that evening with the kids asleep
lay in bed stroking their husband’s wrist tattoo and smoking
Chesterfields from a fresh pack until everything was O.K.
Well, you get the idea. Life goes on, the next day is Sunday,
another ball game, and the other team shows up one man short.

They say we’re one man short, but can we use this boy,
he’s only fifteen years old, and at least he’ll make a game.
They take a look at the kid, muscular and kind of knowing
the way he holds his glove, with the shoulders loose,
the thick neck, but then with that boy’s face under
a clump of angelic blonde hair, and say, oh, hell, sure,
let’s play ball. So it all begins, the men loosening up,
joking about the fat catcher’s sex life, it’s so bad
last night he had to hump his wife, that sort of thing,
pairing off into little games of catch that heat up into
throwing matches, the smack of the fungo bat, lazy jogging
into right field, big smiles and arcs of tobacco juice,
and the talk that gives a cool, easy feeling to the air,
talk among men normally silent, normally brittle and a little
angry with the empty promise of their lives. But they chatter
and say rock and fire, babe, easy out, and go right ahead
and pitch to the boy, but nothing fancy, just hard fastballs
right around the belt, and the kid takes the first two
but on the third pops the bat around so quick and sure
that they pause a moment before turning around to watch
the ball still rising and finally dropping far beyond
the abandoned tractor that marks left field. Holy shit.
They’re pretty quiet watching him round the bases,
but then, what the hell, the kid knows how to hit a ball,
so what, let’s play some goddamned baseball here.
And so it goes. The next time up, the boy gets a look
at a very nifty low curve, then a slider, and the next one
is the curve again, and he sends it over the Allis Chambers,
high and big and sweet. The left fielder just stands there, frozen.
As if this isn’t enough, the next time up he bats left-handed.
They can’t believe it, and the pitcher, a tall, mean-faced
man from Okarche who just doesn’t give a shit anyway
because his wife ran off two years ago leaving him with
three little ones and a rusted-out Dodge with a cracked block,
leans in hard, looking at the fat catcher like he was the sonofabitch
who ran off with his wife, leans in and throws something
out of the dark, green hell of forbidden fastballs, something
that comes in at the knees and then leaps viciously towards
the kid’s elbow. He swings exactly the way he did right-handed,
and they all turn like a chorus line toward deep right field
where the ball loses itself in sagebrush and the sad burnt
dust of dustbowl Oklahoma. It is something to see.

But why make a long story long: runs pile up on both sides,
the boy comes around five times, and five times the pitcher
is cursing both God and His mother as his chew of tobacco sours
into something resembling horse piss, and a ragged and bruised
Spalding baseball disappears into the far horizon. Goodnight,
Irene. They have lost the game and some painful side bets
and they have been suckered. And it means nothing to them
though it should to you when they are told the boy’s name is
Mickey Mantle. And that’s the story, and those are the facts.
But the facts are not the truth. I think, though, as I scan
the faces of these old men now lost in the innings of their youth,
I think I know what the truth of this story is, and I imagine
it lying there in the weeds behind that Allis Chalmers
just waiting for the obvious question to be asked: why, oh
why in hell didn’t they just throw around the kid, walk him,
after he hit the third homer? Anybody would have,
especially nine men with disappointed wives and dirty socks
and diminishing expectations for whom winning at anything
meant everything. Men who knew how to play the game,
who had talent when the other team had nothing except this ringer
who without a pitch to hit was meaningless, and they could go home
with their little two-dollar side bets and stride into the house
singing If You’ve Got the Money, Honey, I’ve Got the Time
with a bottle of Southern Comfort under their arms and grab
Dixie or May Ella up and dance across the gray linoleum
as if it were V-Day all over again. But they did not.
And they did not because they were men, and this was a boy.
And they did not because sometimes after making love,
after smoking their Chesterfields in the cool silence and
listening to the big bands on the radio that sounded so glamorous,
so distant, they glanced over at their wives and notice the lines
growing heavier around the eyes and mouth, felt what their wives
felt: that Les Brown and Glenn Miller and all those dancing couples
and in fact all possibility of human gaiety and light-heartedness
were as far away and unreachable as Times Square or the Avalon
ballroom. They did not because of the gray linoleum lying there
in the half-dark, the free calendar from the local mortuary
that said one day was pretty much like another, the work gloves
looped over the doorknob like dead squirrels. And they did not
because they had gone through a depression and a war that had left
them with the idea that being a man in the eyes of their fathers
and everyone else had cost them just too goddamned much to lay it
at the feet of a fifteen year-old boy. And so they did not walk him,
and lost, but at least had some ragged remnant of themselves
to take back home. But there is one thing more, though it is not
a fact. When I see my friend’s father staring hard into the bottomless
well of home plate as Mantle’s fifth homer heads toward Arkansas,
I know that this man with the half-orphaned children and
worthless Dodge had also encountered for his first and possibly
only time the vast gap between talent and genius, has seen
as few have in the harsh light of an Oklahoma Sunday, the blonde
and blue-eyed bringer of truth, who will not easily be forgotten.

---B.H. Fairchild


B.H. Fairchild's Body And Soul

Out of all the poems I’ve presented this month, I saved my very favorite poem for last. This is my favorite poem. Unabashedly I love this poem and the fascinating story it tells, shuffling the wide gauntlet of emotions from gritty to heart-warming. Fairchild's characters are well developed and many of the lines are well crafted lyrics. When I think of good, lasting poetry I think of this poem. You don't have to love baseball, be from Oklahoma, or have lived through WWII to enjoy this poem, probably because the poem's theme is universal. Like Fairchild's working class families, all of us endeavor to persevere through adversity and carve out our slice of greatness. Sometimes it takes the pinnacle of brilliance to deliver perspective---in this case, a baby-faced farm boy with a mischievous swing who'll eventually slug his way into the New York Yankees hallowed history.

Before I delve into the meat of Body And Soul, it's important I explain a little more about the important place this poem occupies in my mind and heart. When B.H. (Pete) Fairchild came to read at Emerson College two years ago, one of my grad school professors, Dan Tobin, introduced me to B.H. Fairchild. Dan knew the depth of my admiration for Fairchild's poetry and wanted to make sure I could pick his brain for a few minutes. After his reading, I asked B.H. about Body And Soul, specifically about the shocking turn of revealing "the kid" to be a young version of the legendary Mickey Mantle. As I was asking my question a fit of goosebumps cascaded down my arms and then over my whole body. It's rare that we come face to face with the creators of our favorites. I never met Alfred Hitchcock for coffee to ask him how he conceived the final haunting scene of Vertigo. Steve Carell and I have yet to cook up burgers on his George Foreman grill and talk about the intricacies of playing Michael Scott. I wasn't alive to sit in on an Otis Redding recording session at Stax Records in Memphis. I could continue with a litany of other favorites, but I think you catch my drift, or as Otis would have said "you dig." Poetry might be one of the last accessible art forms. Please tell me you see the inherent and wicked irony in this last sentence. Poetry isn't as difficult, high brow, or esoteric as some would have you believe.

Body And Soul is by no means a short poem. It's probably the longest poem I've presented this month, but I would surprisingly contend it's the easiest to read. The long lines Fairchild utilizes mirror a storytelling speech pattern that is just as easy to fall into as a sing-song-Dr.Seuss-rhyming-speech pattern. Fairchild makes this clear, telling us "our fathers fall in love with their own stories, nuzzling / the facts but mauling the truth." Some poems beg to be read to a crowd; Body And Soul is one of these poems. Colloquialisms and slang take the poem from the page and put words into the reader's mouth. I've never been to Commerce, Oklahoma but I feel like a townie when I read " grown men, some in their thirties / and forties who worked together in zinc mines or on oil rigs, /sweat and khaki and long beers after work, steel guitar music / whanging in their ears, little white rent houses to return to / where their wives complained about money and broken Kenmores / and then said the hell with it and sang Body and Soul /
in the bathtub and later that evening with the kids asleep / lay in bed stroking their husband’s wrist tattoo and smoking /Chesterfields from a fresh pack until everything was O.K." Now that he has us firmly entrenched in the life and lore of small town Oklahoma, it's time for the story to begin.

The teams gather and the visiting team is one man short, "but can we use this boy, / he’s only fifteen years old, and at least he’ll make a game." Sure as hell he'll make a game, he'd make any game, especially in a sandlot with a crowd of has-beens and never-was ball playing mechanics and factory workers. They look forward to this game with a vigilant enthusiasm that makes all the hardships smaller. They look forward to putting on the uniform, loosening up their arms, swinging the lumber, tasting dirt and spitting tobacco, rubbing the balls seams against their fingertips. The game is an event, even if there is no great crowd watching and even if they'll never gain a dime off their efforts. And the game heats up: "But they chatter /
and say rock and fire, babe, easy out, and go right ahead / and pitch to the boy, but nothing fancy, just hard fastballs / right around the belt, and the kid takes the first two / but on the third pops the bat around so quick and sure / that they pause a moment before turning around to watch / the ball still rising and finally dropping far beyond / the abandoned tractor that marks left field. Holy shit. / They’re pretty quiet watching him round the bases, / but then, what the hell, the kid knows how to hit a ball, / so what, let’s play some goddamned baseball here." Yes sir, let's play some baseball. Fairchild captures the nuances of the game and playing it so naturally. It's obvious that he grew up playing and knows what it's like to drive the winning run in, but also give up the winning run.

After another home run by the kid, the order turns around and he's at bat again. The pitcher has seen him take two solid pitches and park them deep outside the park. He's determined not to give up a third homer to the kid, who lines up left-handed for his third at bat. "They can’t believe it, and the pitcher, a tall, mean-faced / man from Okarche who just doesn’t give a shit anyway / because his wife ran off two years ago leaving him with / three little ones and a rusted-out Dodge with a cracked block, / leans in hard, looking at the fat catcher like he was the sonofabitch / who ran off with his wife, leans in and throws something / out of the dark, green hell of forbidden fastballs, something / that comes in at the knees and then leaps viciously towards / the kid’s elbow." I have to pause to point out how seamlessly Fairchild moves between the characters and the action in this poem. Here, he moves from the kid, to all the players, to the pitcher, and then back to the kid. The pitcher's life melds with his process and we, yet again, understand just how important this game is to these men. The pitcher is using it as a release and an emblematic reminder of happier days. But even though his anger is magnificent and his love for the game is true, he was not kissed with talent like the kid he's pitching to. The kid "swings exactly the way he did right-handed, / and they all turn like a chorus line toward deep right field / where the ball loses itself in sagebrush and the sad burnt / dust of dustbowl Oklahoma. It is something to see." It sure is something to see and, thank God, Fairchild makes sure we see it.

The kid will come to bat more times and smack more balls into oblivion. He wins the game single-handedly for his team. "And it means nothing to them / though it should to you when they are told the boy’s name is /Mickey Mantle. And that’s the story, and those are the facts." The whole poem has been tinged with magic, but this is where the spell is cast. This is where the poem finds its gravity and cements itself in our minds. In finding this gravity, Fairchild has created the exact moment where the most incisive question must be asked: "why, oh / why in hell didn’t they just throw around the kid, walk him, / after he hit the third homer? Anybody would have, / especially nine men with disappointed wives and dirty socks /and diminishing expectations for whom winning at anything / meant everything." We've seen the dust that accumulates in their lives and we've seen the broken parts in need of repair but lacking the funds necessary to have them replaced. So many of the characters in this poem are bankrupt in some way. To see them lose this baseball game, especially to this kid, is heart wrenching. You can't help but think these men deserve better. But why didn't they pitch around Mantle? Fairchild seizes this question with an elegant sweeping answer: "And they did not because they were men, and this was a boy...And they did not / because they had gone through a depression and a war that had left / them with the idea that being a man in the eyes of their fathers / and everyone else had cost them just too goddamned much to lay it / at the feet of a fifteen year-old boy. And so they did not walk him, / and lost, but at least had some ragged remnant of themselves / to take back home. But there is one thing more, though it is not / a fact. When I see my friend’s father staring hard into the bottomless / well of home plate as Mantle’s fifth homer heads toward Arkansas, / I know that this man with the half-orphaned children and / worthless Dodge had also encountered for his first and possibly / only time the vast gap between talent and genius, has seen / as few have in the harsh light of an Oklahoma Sunday, the blonde / and blue-eyed bringer of truth, who will not easily be forgotten." Wow, I still get chills reading these final fourteen lines. This is the type of writing that changes lives. I know this because it has changed my life, it has made me understand that writing a poem of this magnitude goes beyond working remarkably hard. The pitcher in this poem worked remarkably hard in all facets of his life and still came up empty. I don't want to be that pitcher. I don't want my hard work to go by the wayside. I want affirmation that I've been blessed with unique talent and, although I might not be a genius, I have poems and stories worth telling.

Langston Hughes - A Dream Deferred

A Dream Deferred

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

---Langston Hughes



Langston Hughes’ A Dream Deferred


All month long I’ve shared my favorite poems with all of you. I’ve taken you into my thoughts and laid out my interpretations, leaving it up to you to agree or disagree. Truthfully, I don’t think you have a choice; the poem will speak to you or it will fall on deaf ears. The poem might not speak to you the first time you read it, but in later encounters it will resonate (as I pointed out last night with Robert Frost’s Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening). Joseph Brodsky, the Russian writer who spent much of his life in the US, theorized that every person should know one poet cover-to-cover. There are many poets that I know thoroughly, but I’m still searching for the poet that I’ll know completely in the way Joseph Brodsky advocated. This search, this quest, is about making a dream come true, about avoiding the deferment and explosion.

Langston Hughes is for many people the poet Joseph Brodsky spoke of. Hughes was a witty, courageous writer. A major figure of the Harlem Renaissance, he was more than a witness and activist; you need only look at a handful of his poems to understand how diverse a writer Langston Hughes was. A Dream Deferred is undoubtedly Langston Hughes’ most famous poem. (Yes, Lorraine Hansberry borrowed from Langston for the title of her iconic play A Raisin In The Sun) I’m consistently intrigued by poems that “crossover” and achieve mainstream appeal and significance. Why will Rudyard Kipling’s If or Robert Frost’s The Road Less Traveled be quoted at a thousand high school and college graduations this spring? Why will a young man woo his beautiful would-be girlfriend with Pablo Neruda’s Love Sonnets? Why does A Dream Deferred seem to spread, seem to “explode” and dazzle young minds? These are questions with simple answers, in fact I’ve already answered them. These poems speak to people en masse. So, then, the ultimate question becomes why do these poems not just speak to people, but speak to overwhelmingly large groups of people. Poetry lab is in session, let’s take on A Dream Deferred as experiment number one.

The poem begins with a question that excludes no one. I’ve never met anyone who has no dreams (and I hope to never meet anyone so hopeless as to have no dreams). Dreams are a universal currency, stockpiled at night when the world itself slows, but never sleeps. Why are dreams important? They serve as motivation, inspiration, and the almighty hope that each of us requires. Our society is plagued with circumstances that are disheartening; Langston Hughes knew this---he lived this---but he still had dreams. He had dreams he acted on and dreams that dried “up / like a raisin in the sun.” I love that simile; I love all the similes in this poem. A dream deferred would seem to die from inactivity and lack of effort, but it would also seem to die from constant thought and the inability to release it, hence the reference to a dream that “fester(s) like a sore---And then run(s).”

What else would a dream deferred resemble? Rotten meat. A Syrupy Sweet. I buy both of these. I can smell the stink of my deferred dreams. I can taste the sugar of the dreams I pursued but never fully realized, still hoping that I can bring them to fruition. And I’ll always feel the weight of the dreams I waited on and said I’d one day pursue. Those are the “heavy load.” With that heaviest of similes looming over the end of the poem, Langston Hughes steers the poem in a completely fresh direction. He bookends the poem’s initial question that launched us into a world of memorable similes with another question: “Or does it explode?” This ending is pure genius. It’s so natural that I wonder if it was the first piece of the poem to arise in Langston Hughes’ mind. The ending is not cartoonish as some of the other similes in the poem are, it opens into the most frightening possibility: that our dreams can explode. With no other similes, no other images, this is what Hughes leaves us with---the abrupt ending of a catastrophically exploding dream. This is why the poem has crossed over: the daunting mystery of imploding and exploding dreams, the hanging silence, and the new dreams that will rise like dust from the kicked up tracks of dreams deferred.

Robert Frost - Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening

Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

---Robert Frost


Robert Frost's Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening

I did not love this poem the first time I read it in high school. I did not love it when, like a boomerang, it returned to me in college. And just last year, this was a poem I would skip over if I saw it in an anthology. There didn't seem much I could gain from this poem. It was straightforward; why should I waste my time and thinking power on a poem that clearly didn't need me. Frost had created a world that was compact and confined, or so I thought. Mary Oliver deserves much of the credit for this poem finding its way into my favorites. (Please do yourself a favor and pick up her Poetry Handbook from your library or bookstore. It's a spirited read on basic poetry concepts with an intended audience of writers and readers alike) In reading her Poetry Handbook earlier this year, I found Oliver's close reading and clinical treatment of Frost's Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening to be enthralling and highly educational. As Oliver proved, this just might be the ideal teaching poem. It has rhythm and meter, a fully developed structure, characters and images, an underlying story, and much mystery. I did not love this poem at first sight, but I've grown to love this poem---as often is the case with love.

Frost begins this iconic poem with a declaration that establishes a sense of the relationship between the poem's speaker and other characters. He starts, "Whose woods these are I think I know." Aha, I know who lives here, but wait, "His house is in the village though." Because he lives a distance from this spot, "He will not see me stopping here / To watch his woods fill up with snow." The observing of nature and people has always been central to poetry; dare I say poets are glorified voyeurs...Frost's speaker in this poem is pausing for a rest in these woods filling with snow. He doesn't need to do much in terms of imagery to make this beautiful, a snowy woods is naturally incandescent and requires little to grow beautiful in our minds. Instead, Frost utilizes the first stanza to establish much of the poem's framework. He answers questions of where we are and what season we are in, while also texturing the poem's circumstances.

The second stanza turns our view to the speaker's horse, further flesching out the image of him stopping on this snowy evening. He has dismounted from his horse, who "must think it queer / To stop without a farmhouse near / Between the woods and frozen lake / The darkest evening of the year." Frost's generousity in endowing his horse with perceptiveness and intelligence is curious. He intends to raise our eyebrows with this bit of personification. Are we seriously to believe that a horse can discern all of the qualities in this situation that Frost lists? He gives these qualities to his "little horse" as a way of supplying them to readers. We can't avoid these questions, if nothing else for fear of being upstaged by a horse who rivals Mr. Ed in intellect. But why would we want to avoid these questions---they are, indeed, intriguing. Why is he stopping? What appeal does this woods hold? Are his intentions creepy? holy? sincere? for profit? And, like that, Frost has me hooked. Part of his ability to reel me in is certainly due to the tight rhyme scheme and carefully crafted lines with no extraneous words or repetitive line structures.

The third stanza picks up where the previous one left off with more personification. The horse's movement causes his bells to shake, which Frost interprets as asking "if there's some mistake." The horse has become a full fledged character and a mouthpiece for the reading audience. He has transitioned from a "little" insert to complete a rhyme scheme to a vital component in the poem's story. Frost is notorious for his attention to sensory detail. Notice his ear for sound in this poem, especially the third stanza. The calming quiet of a snow storm settles into our hearing when Frost describes the outside as "the sweep / Of easy wind and downy flake." But in this excellent bit of description, Frost is also omiting attention to the pivotal question of why the speaker is stopping, allowing tension and mystery to build. Oh, that Robert Frost was a crafty bugger.

Reaching the concluding stanza, we wonder if this reason for stopping will emerge and if a sight will be laid out before our speaker that will catalyze his respite into something larger and emblematic. Frost is direct and evasive at the same time in this final stanza, a very difficult task to accomplish. He praises the woods as "lovely, dark and deep," which seems to be an unlikely compliment. Dark and deep imply unease and impending danger or surprise, making their use as complimentary all the more intriguing. Why has he stopped? We'll never know, but we do know why he's leaving---well, we sort of know why: "But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep." These are the type of last lines that deserve a haunting voice and an eerie wink. They leave me wanting another stanza, but I know another stanza would just about ruin their intrigue that Frost so carefully built in this poem. If we know what these promises are then they are less meaningful---as they are in this poem, these promises can be molded to fit readers specific impressions. The haunting refrain that ends the poem is unexpected and represents a tonal surprise. The sleep is obviously an allegory for much more, but again Frost is evasive and vague, which suits this poem very well. It teeters on the fringes, a perfect place for the poem's location and speaker.