Poetry’s finest non-poet passes, leaves legacy of NH's Frost Place

Don Hall said of the Frost Place that it was a special place dedicated to poetry, not to poets.
It’s an important distinction to make in the wake of the passing of Donald Sheehan, founding director of the famous poetry sanctuary in Franconia. Sheehan died May 26 at his home in Charleston, S.C. He was 70.
For those who label themselves poets, but have never pilgrimaged to Frost Place, shame on you. Robert Frost and his family lived and then spent summers at the old farm in Franconia from about 1915 to 1940. The famous front porch, where frost wrote, overlooks the White Mountains.
For New England poets and lovers of poetry, it’s a place of serene quite and thoughtfulness, and worthy of a day trip. With its old mailbox with “Frost” painted on the side, to the trails in back where Frost walked, it’s a monastery of poetry.

And its fame is due mainly to Donald Sheehan. From 1977, Sheehan served as the Frost Place’s executive director. Each summer, the Frost Place awards a fellowship to an emerging American poet, including a cash stipend and the opportunity to live and write in the house for several months. In addition, The Frost Place has sponsored an annual Festival and Conference on Poetry.
Sheehan was not himself a poet. But he knew a good poem when he read one! He was also a teacher and critic at Dartmouth. Put bluntly, Frost Place, and New England poetry would not be what it is without Sheehan.
Sheehan’s vision was simple? It’s about the poem, stupid. No matter the standing, or the ego, of the resident poet, poets abided by their words. Nothing else mattered. Follow that simple rule, a Sheehan would write one of his legendary introductions for you, hold your hand through the poetry universe and be your greatest supporter. Cross him, dare to put on airs, and you would not be asked to come back.
The lessons of Sheehan’s Frost Place can be applied today. Poetry is non-hierarchical; words matter, focus on the poem, not the poet, and all poetry will be better off. Poetry is community-minded; poets are the philosophers of art, a poem is there to provide insight and depth to the human condition, not to the poet’s condition. Poetry should be informal, but serious; learn to laugh at yourself and your work will take on deeper depth. Poetry should be rejuvenating; even when a poet goes to a dark place, the reader should understand his own life better and act on that understanding. A poet is accessible; no one is better than you, no poet stand taller than the rest.
Sheehan was a deeply spiritual man, who took humility and strength of character seriously and personally. Visit Frost Place. Visit quietly, and reverently, like it’s a church or temple. Listen to what Sheehan’s Frost Place tells you. Then shut up and write.

In honor of Donald Sheehan, here’s a short list of Robert Frost books. If you are a poet, wish to be a poet, or enjoy poetry, Frost’s first five collections should be on your shelves.

A Boy’s Will (1913) Published in England, the book has few famous poems but allowed Frost to enter into the circle of poets, including Ezra Pound. Read: “Mowing”

North of Boston (1914) The big one, one hit after another. Frost begins early to cement his style and fame. Read: “Mending Wall,” “After Apple Picking”

Mountain Interval (1916) The most famous modern English language poem is released. Read: “The Road Not Taken”

New Hampshire (1923) Frost’s ode to the Granite State won him the Pulitzer. Read: “New Hampshire,” “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

West-Running Brook (1928) The famous title poem stood out, but Frost’s mature style makes this collection memorable. Read: “Spring Pools,” “Tree at My Window.”

FLASHBACK: Wislawa Szymborska (1923- ), View with a Grain of Sand, Harcourt Brace, 1995, 214 words

This week, we look back on great works by poets little known in the United States, but widely acknowledged as literary giants elsewhere.
This magnificent collection from Polish essayist and poet Wislawa Szymborska likely contributed to her winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. View with a Grain of Sand, a selection of her work spanning 1957-1993, hits most of the highpoints that made this poet one of the most popular in Europe.
Her fame as a poet is even more amazing considering her poetic output is fairly slim, about 250 poems total to date.
View with a Grain of Sand captures selections from seven previous volumes, though the focus is on later work such as The End and the Beginning (1993) and A Large Number (1972).
If there is any one theme of Szymborska's poetry, it's the grandness of life's small moments. She best known for employing literary devices like irony and understatement to illuminate great philosophical obsessions, and this collection does a fine job of providing a reader unfamiliar with this poet a window into those major themes.
The title poem, from her collection The People on the Bridge (1986), is an ideal example of both Szymborska's use of irony and her existential focus on the everyday. In it, the narrator explains that nature - sand, lakes, sky - are connected to us only through our own experience, that nature itself has only the interest or concern for us as we apply to it. She writes of a grain of sand: "Our glance, our touch mean nothing to it. / it doesn't feel itself seen or touched. / And that it fell on the windowsill / is only our experience, not its."
The reader can also come away understanding Szymborska's amazing growth as a poet. Her early work is tentative and immature. In Calling Out to Yeti (1957) Szymborska is too careful, stumbling over her metaphors. In "Nothing Twice," a poem about fleeting life, she forces clumsy rhymes: "It's in its nature not to stay: / Today is always gone tomorrow."
The volume does leave out any mention of her two earliest collections, no doubt to avoid any controversy among the Nobel Committee considering her for the reward the following year. She was a loyal Stalinist in Poland in the early 1950s. And though she walked away from her Socialist ideology and renounced her early political work, a complete picture of this poet would have included her poems dedicated to Lenin and the glories of industrial construction.
For the reader interested in the human condition, Szymborska has been around long enough to know what she's talking about. View with a Grain of Sand is a worthy collection from one of Europe's most popular poets.