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In the Shadow of Robert Frost
He kept crossing out words and some entire lines of my precious poem. By chance, I’d carried it with me to the poetry reading at The Frost Place, a low-slung white farmhouse in Franconia, N.H., where Robert Frost himself had lived and written. I shivered despite the warm summer air, thinking that the great American poet used to sit on this very porch.
Or was the shiver because my hopes of being A Poet were being crossed out, all over the page? Wait, now Sydney Lea changed over to circling some phrases. Entire phrases.
“There’s some fine new language where I’m marking now,” he explained, not looking up from his effort. “What I’ve crossed out is either unnecessary or trite. And you need to pay attention to how you’re choosing your line breaks. They have to be on stronger words. Like these.” He underlined three. So few strong words here?
Those minutes and that marked page made up my first lesson in the work that can go into a poem.
Even while his pen tracked the lines, I understood that Sydney Lea, a well-published poet and at that point leading the Board for The Frost Place, was being extraordinarily generous. Yes, I’d bought some of his books, and even attended one of his own readings. But as a poet, at that point some twenty years ago, I scored as an amateur: “a person who takes part in an activity because they are…
