More on the Found Robert Frost Poem

UNKNOWN FROST POEM COMES OUT FROM HIDING AT U-VA.
September 29, 2006 Washington Post
On the opening page of a small leather-bound book in a University of Virginia library, graduate student Robert Stilling found an inscription in brownish-gray ink. It was a poem by Robert Frost, in the poet's own hand, unknown and, Stilling believes, unpublished. "It's like coming across aruin," he said, finding a poem that Frost seemed to have abandoned. "It was a complete bolt out of the blue," said Ted Genoways, editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, the kind of dramatic discovery that scholars dream of as they pore over manuscripts and letters. The poem, "War Thoughts at Home," has particular resonance now, Stilling said. It will be published, for thefirst time, it is believed, in the Virginia Quarterly Review available Monday.

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I believe that when you begin writing you must apprentice yourself to the trade. You need to master the forms, practice the exercises, like learning and practicing scales on a piano…. But now, when I write a poem, I discover the form as I write…. The first draft may happen quickly. I then try to recognize the poem’s configuration, its meter or rhythm, and attempt to give the poem voice and shape. What intrigues and fascinates me is how complex a creature a poem can be. The content, the emotion, the images will leap up at you, but the subliminal formal elements are at work in the background.

--Elise Paschen

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Fortune Cookie 9/27/2006:

No problem can stand the assault of sustained thinking.