Bohemia

Authors and actors and artists and such
Never know nothing, and never know much.
Sculptors and singers and those of their kidney
Tell their affairs from Seattle to Sydney.
Playwrights and poets and such horses’ necks
Start off from anywhere, end up at sex.
Diarists, critics, and similar roe
Never say nothing, and never say no.
People Who Do Things exceed my endurance;
God, for a man that solicits insurance!

-- Dorothy Parker

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Robert Frost (1874 – 1963)

Those who witnessed John F. Kennedy’s inauguration will never forget the aged Robert Frost at the windswept podium, the youthful new president holding down the fluttering pages as the old man fought the glare of the sun. Both men would be dead two years later. Robert Frost was America’s most popular poet when he died two months shy of age 89. Although we think of Frost as a New Englander, he was born in San Francisco. He lived in England with his family in 1912, and received the support of Ezra Pound, who helped him publish his first two books. Returning to the United States in 1915, Frost became a 40-year-old farmer/poet, and eventually his persona of self-serving tyrant softened to the folksy, white-haired grandfather figure with a New England twang. He won four Pulitzer Prizes and the Gold Medal by the National Institute of Arts and Letters. His poetry is appealing and accessible, but not always as simple as it seems—Frost was a master of using symbolism to underlay the more obvious forms or actions in the poems.

--From Poetry Speaks

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I received a rejection yesterday from the strange fruit.