Free-for-All Verse
I’ve never been arrested by the police, but I was chased and roughed up by the thought police last summer. That armed force, most prevalent on college campuses and in other intellectual arenas, descended on a group of us, unprovoked, brandishing their sharpest weapons—inferences, assumptions, stock phrases, identity politics—while we were attending an August workshop at the Robert Frost Place in New Hampshire.
It was there in the town of Franconia and environs, where the great American poet lived and worked, the very barn where he milked his cows and ruminated on metaphors, that a few of us in a week-long poetry workshop were told what we could never say again or what we could not even contemplate writing about. “Interrogate the prerogative,” was the phrase one of the stern, but friendly arresting officers-in-charge kept intoning to us should we ever decide to write about some historical event for which we were not present or by which we were not directly affected. Although I felt the sting of the cops’ weapons, I was not quite as bruised as some of my fellow poetic arrestees.
This was my second time attending the Frost Place summer workshop in which fellow poets, professional and amateur, convene on a private school campus to share works in daily three-hour sessions. In my workshop, I was teamed with five other women; our instructor was a visiting professor from a notable state university. The first event in class to draw the ire of the thought police involved a student poem. Class procedure follows that the poet reads aloud his/her work first, then hands it to another participant to read aloud. One of the students in my class, a 30-something African-American schoolteacher, wrote a stinging work about why she will never feel at home in the American South, admittedly less of a poem and more a screed in prose. Her poem contained the N word (a word I will not utter under any circumstances). She read her work aloud, but substituted “person of color” for the N word that appeared on her page. When the poem was handed to one of my fellow poets, a 60-something practicing surgeon and professor of the subject, she read the word as printed on the page.
At that moment, the thought police unsheathed their weapons and donned protective gear, aiming for a confrontation, as if a Molotov cocktail had been hurled in the classroom. The poet said that she was troubled by a white woman having said the word, even though it had been printed for her to utter. It seemed, the younger poet had strung a trip wire across the classroom, seeing if one of us would fall.
But the wrath of the thought police was not fully felt until day two of our workshop. Another of my other fellow class poets, a public high school English teacher, wrote a poem about visiting an historic plantation (one of the words we were later told that was not allowed in our vocabulary) and discovering its slave past, as well as a lynching (another forbidden word) that had occurred there centuries ago. It was a bad poem, clumsy in its language, labored in its sentiment. The resulting classroom conversation was difficult and uncomfortable, and one which elicited inordinate microaggression. I could sense the discomfort by the African-American woman at the sheer amount of apologizing that took place.
By the next day, we, as a group, were told that the African-American woman had issued a complaint to the directors of the program, claiming that she no longer felt “safe” with any of us—due to the doctor in class having read the word in her own poem and for the other poem about the plantation visit. She withdrew then and there from the workshop; all of us were then informed that our group was officially disbanded. (I was lucky, for writing poems about unrequited love, my favorite topic, is clearly a “safe” topic; I’m the only victim.) The instructor was told not to speak on campus to the doctor poet or the woman who’d written about the plantation, their crimes clearly egregious.
After the assault on us, I intoned some of the namesake poet’s sentiments as salves for the wounds. “I’d like to get away from earth awhile/And then come back to it and begin over.”, a favorite line of mine from Birches. Even though the workshop is over, ramifications of the incident continue to reverberate. Just as Frost discerns in After Apple-Picking, I, too, “…keep hearing from the cellar bin/The rumbling sound/Of load on load of apples coming in.”
In being instructed by personnel of the Frost Place that I, a Caucasian male, should not even ponder the idea of writing about the institution of slavery in America (I have referenced the infamous Western African embarkation station in a personal essay), I wonder if that means that other topics, too, are off limits. As someone who is half Jewish, does that mean I have a quota on how many times I am allowed to utter such words as “Auschwitz” or “concentration camp” or “Nazi”? Am I not allowed to discuss in print the Armenian genocide? Could any of the women in my workshop write about the practice of male circumcision? I participated in the woman’s march in November 2018, but am I allowed to write about that (I did post a 46-second video on my Instagram) but could I be accused of “gender appropriation”? Any subject too vast for us to comprehend, we were told, should be off limits to our imaginations. Could that mean also the Mariana Trench or the Milky Way or, for that matter, the number of ingredients in a Milky Way candy bar?
In Gathering Leaves, Frost knew that “they grew duller/From contact with earth, next to nothing for color.” When a poet, or any writer, is forced to refrain from writing about experiences unfamiliar, or to which we have a visceral response but not an expert intellectual grasp, we’ll be guaranteed a hueless poetic art form. As a poet, I can say, as the achingly great Frost does in his iconic Mending Wall, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”
As a feature writer and staff magazine editor, as well as a playwright and poet, I cannot imagine living a life in which I cannot state what I wish, when I wish, or take on any topic, exhaustively or tangentially, that appeals to me.
I can surmise that part of my colleague’s aggressive response to the reading of her own poem with the N word and the reading of the other poem about the plantation was, in part, in response to a collective mircroaggression—that hyper concern among white people for matters related to her race. I can be guilty of such aggressions, though I try hard to temper them. I also do wonder if we were set up by that colleague. The trip-wire word had been printed and if any of us pronounced it, we would fall.
And yet, what I choose to remember about that offended colleague and the event is what happened the very first evening of the workshop, before any of this situation erupted. Like all the participants, I attended the evening reading in the Frost barn. I arrived early and parked in a lower lot, a half-mile away. At seven o’clock it was still light, and the walk up to the barn along the windy dirt road, lined on one side by dense woods and on the other by the undulating profile of the mountains, was easy. By nightfall, though, when the reading was over, it had become so dark that I couldn’t find my way down the road. The light on my phone was wholly insufficient to show me the way, and with warnings of bears and moose, I could feel a fast rising fear—stepping/running foot by foot in a non-iambic meter.
But then, a car came down the road behind me, its tires crunching on the gravel, the beams of the headlights smoldering in the air. The car pulled up beside me and the window lowered. The African–¬American colleague from my class was in the passenger seat.
“We were worried about you when we saw you walk away,” she said from her seat. “Walk in front of us until you reach your car. We’ll show you the way.”
I wouldn’t have been able to find my way without their help. As they drove off from my lot, giving a beep of the horn, and I was safely in the car, I thought, as Frost had written, now, “I have been one acquainted with the night.”
Fortunately, by conference’s end the thought police had taken a donut break from which they never returned, though the wail of their siren echoed. All of the participants joyfully read their own works at the podium in the barn, as is custom at the workshop, everyone clapping madly for each other, proving that, as Frost claims in Birches, “earth’s the right place for love; I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.”
In our era of identity politics where someone else is immediately responsible for any of our own personal failings, there was a hyperawareness at work at the workshops. The African-American woman was hypersensitive to any potential racism and the white participants were microaggressive in their efforts to offset and disprove any accidental racism. Our country is fueled by a racist bully of a president and that dynamic, too, added to the hypersensitivity on display. In Exposed Nest, Frost writes about a suddenly uncovered family of birds and whether the mother would return, asking, “…might our meddling make her more afraid…We saw the risk we took in doing good…”
