1. My poem came into being after I returned to my home state of Maine for a brief visit.
2. My favorite line from my poem is: "This path between two sleeps confounds the mind..."
3. No particular line gave me problems. They were all hard to come by.
4. I have been writing poetry since I first met Robert Frost in Portland, Maine when I was a third-grade school child. I was very impressed by him and his dedication to poetry. I met him again when he opened the Poetry Center at The University Of Arizona in 1960.
5. To read the poem aloud to an audience, I would introduce it thusly: "In my home state of Maine, as the seasons turn, I always consider my history, the natural world and death. This is a reflection on all together with the detail that "Buddy" was my dog who died and whom we burried on our rural property."
6. I believe Frost--being as he, like me put roots deep into New England-- has influenced me the most. His New England, salty metaphors have always stuck with me. I've also enjoyed Elizabeth Bishop and others too numerous to mention.
7. My favorite Frost poem would be: THE ROAD NOT TAKEN.
Along the road to town the thin ice breaks To pack my heel and sole in rich mud cakes. Here apples lie that fell two storms ago, Hid from the crows beneath a lid of snow,
I shield my eyes to view the fields at dawn, The steam that coats the sky lifts from the pond. Now matted creatures start to stretch and creep Whose winter purpose merely was to sleep,
The snow that melted only yesterday Reveals the shovel never put away. Its biting edge honed down to lacey crust; A seasoned victim of the hand of rust,
From birch wood, birds of lighter feather call Assuring us their here though prodigal And there beside the grape roots tangling; The place we buried Buddy that cold spring.
A flock of ravens turns agains the sun To say it's time to get a day's work done As I return along the river's glare To fence posts needing seasonal repair.
This path between two sleeps confounds the mind Of those more schooled and wiser than my kind. Each day I take up ax with hands worn rough As sleep will overtake me soon enough.
GRC: I started the poem on a sleepless night in a motel, after visiting my father's gravesite in KY for the first time.
RFrostED: Do you have a favorite line or phrase or word in your poem?
GRC: Yes, first off I liked the way repetitions started cropping up, then became part of the music, which I began using consciously; the music and repetition landed pleasingly, for me, on the closing line.
RFrostED: How long have you been working on poetry?
GRC: I've been writing poetry for about 19 years, navigating a long struggle with evolving craft.
RFrostED: To read the poem out loud to an audience, how would you introduce it?
GRC: I would probably mention the stimulus that led to the poem, i.e. that moment seeing my dad's name carved in stone.
RFrostED: What poets' work has taught you the most.
GRC: I've learned so much by studying with and reading about and reading the works of poets I love, but I don't think I can narrow it down to a single strongest influence. Some of my favorites are Stephen Dunn, Stanley Kunitz, Mark Doty, and Jane Kenyon, but there are many more.
RFrostED: Do you have a favorite Frost poem? If so, what is it.
GRC: I have always loved "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" but I might stop short of choosing one poem that's a favorite.
Something about the coldness in the letters of a name
carved in granite: cold gray sheen
something in the way it weighs down soil
a few hours loosened, tamped back down
something in the letters of a name
cold, plain-spoken, straight, something
in the letters, his name her name
printed in stone, like a tablet / like a lid
holding down the loosened soil
the tamped-down soil
rained-on snowed-on blown-on soil
lidded down, back cover of a book you loved
finished now, returned to its place
beside the ones whose words whose claims
had stirred the blood awhile
their own covers sloughing away
decade by year by day by hour
How many names have you read like this
the spelled-out numbered names the frame of dates
something about this, the name you knew
name you know, carved in stone,
the way it weighs their days,
tamps their silence down.
Gayle Reed Carroll has taught Art, primarily in the Clairton, Pennsylvania public schools, and calligraphy at Carnegie Mellon University and in the Mt. Lebanon School District’s Adult Education program. She earned an AB in Art at Hood College and an MFA in Graphic Design at CMU. She began writing poetry in the early nineties and has studied with poets including Stephen Dunn, Kenneth Rosen, Jan Beatty, Patricia Dobler, Lynn Emanuel, and Heather McHugh. Wendell Berry selected her poem, "Dementia," as first prize winner in the Thomas Merton Institute's Poetry of the Sacred Award in 2009. Other poems have appeared in several small magazines and anthologies, including Poet Lore, The Comstock Review, City Paper, Black River Review, and Voices from the Attic. Carroll is a resident of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Here's the background on "Crossing to Fox Island" supplied by the author, Gregory Loselle.
1. How did your poem come into being?
"Crossing to Fox Island" is part of a book-length manuscript I worked on in the year or so after my maternal grandfather died. The book as a whole (which I'm seeking to have published) is a work of grief and remembrance, feelings which I think echo nostalgically throughout the poems. Part of the strategy I followed was to compile important childhood memories of growing up in and around my grandparents' house, linking them with the surroundings--Elba Island, off Grosse Ile, south of Detroit--and redacting them, as it were, by working them into a larger framework of remembered experience.
2. Do you have a favorite line or phrase or word in your poem?
The first and last lines, which are the key to understanding the construction I've make of the experience, are my favorites.
3 Do you have a line that gave you particular difficulties?
Not particularly, though I did fret a bit about "from land to island," which sounded too easy.
4. How long have you been working on poetry?
I've been writing seriously since high school, so for about 30 years.
5. To read the poem out loud to an audience, how would you introduce it?
I've just done that for my high school students, as I told them about the award. Since I teach in the community where the poem is set, it was easy to draw the parallels between my experience and theirs.
6. What poets' work has taught you the most.
Frost is important, of course, as is T.S. Eliot--the first and last lines of "Crossing" echo the "In my beginning is my end/In my end is my beginning" lines from "Four Quartets"--but I'm a big fan of Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes as well, and I love Wallace Stevens.
7. Do you have a favorite Frost poem? If so, what is it.
I have favorite moments from Frost: his line "what to make of a diminished thing" from "The Oven Bird" was a thematic model for "Crossing."
Every act is first an act of faith: One foot, slowly, lowered to the ice, And then the other, and we stand Above the vault the river winters under,
And look across the flat unreal expanse, Imagination telling us we cannot stand Where water ought to be-- where water is Beneath us. Then we start across the ice.
Some patches, dark and flat, are panes of glass, Like windows into night beneath our feet, Where trapped air scatters from our steps Reminding us that we are more like stones
Than shadows, howsoever lightly We might cross above the shuttered flow And tread the temporary span from land To island. Snow abrades the most of it:
Bright crusty scabs that crumble underfoot, And leave us gasping, stumbling in the space Above the space we occupied, reminded Of the weight above the depths below.
One inch will hold one walker, if he's light, And two a group, and three or four a car: We counted out the thickness as we dressed And count it as we walk across it now,
And onto land again, the island's crested beach, The trees that rise among the drifts. And looking back We measure out the distance, trace our tracks, Where every act of faith was first an act.
--Gregory Loselle
Since Loselle was not present in Lawrence when the award was announced, Jarita Davis, the 2009 judge, read the poem, recorded by Lawrence Community Cable Access in the video beolw:
Since publishing his first work, a play, at the age of eighteen, Gregory Loselle has won four Hopwood Awards at The University of Michigan, where he earned an MFA. He has also won The Academy of American Poets Prize, the William van Wert Fiction Award from Hidden River Arts, and The Ruby Lloyd Apsey Award for Playwriting. Most recently, he is the winner of the 2009 Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition.
A chapbook, Phantom Limb, was published in 2008--and another, Our Parents Dancing, is forthcoming--from Pudding House Press. His short fiction has been featured in the Wordstock and Robert Olen Butler Competition anthologies, as well as in The Saturday Evening Post, and his poetry has appeared in The Ledge, Oberon, The Comstock Review, Rattle, The Spoon River Poetry Review, The Pinch, Alehouse, Sow’s Ear, and online in The Ambassador Poetry Project.
He teaches secondary Language Arts and Art History in southeastern Michigan, drilling his students in the distinctions between can and may, good and well.
Recently, Mark Schorr has been thinking about Frost's early lyric experiments and how they reflect his early creativity in Lawrence and Derry. For the last five years, he has served as Executive Director of the Robert Frost Foundation
