Robert Frost on the path to Vietnam

So poems deal with grief, said Frost,

Not grievance. But who bore the cost

When snowy woods turned real estate?

And how was patrimony lost?

Old Abenaki met their fate

When white men came to dominate;

Interred their story dark and deep;

Enclosed their land behind a gate.

So let’s rouse Robert from his sleep

Update the verse form, take a leap

To rapping, toasting, hip-hopping;

Reveal injustice, make ‘em weep:

His palms are freezing, knees weak, lungs are wheezing

There’s ice forming on his coat, he’s chilly

Horse nervous, on the surface shivers involuntarily

But he’s on a promise, no time to reminisce

At a lake where black folk once came to fish

Bobby don’t know jack about that shit

He opens his mouth but the words that come out

Contain no audible trace of it.

Two paths diverge when composing verse:

One ‘political’, the other, ‘not’.

So which is better, and which the worse?

Or should I not try to intersperse

The anguish of loss with spray of shot

In tales about a native home

Deprived at point of settler’s gun?

Looking down one, through years to come:

A distant forest, ablaze as some

Hellish sky-borne concatenation

Deals death, with lies to justify.

How one way leads on to another

Cannot be poets’ job to descry.

Else they’d be in all sorts of bother

As they go travelling on by.

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Robert Frost's oft-quoted dictum that poetry should concern itself with grief, not grievance, comes from a position of privilege. My poem adopts the verse form from two of his best-known works. The first, Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening, opens with the line: "Whose woods these are I think I know". It therefore ignores the process by which a patch of land became private property in the first place: highly problematical in a settler-colonial society. I interrupt with a snatch of rap verse, before then satirising Frost's equally famous The Path Not Taken. I am suggesting that, by positing a category of 'the poetic' which is counterposed to 'the political', this notion of poetry naturalises privilege and makes itself a handmaiden of power; power that finds its ultimate expression in warfare.

To be published by Collaborature on May 26th, 2025 at link: https://collaborature.blogspot.com/2025/05/robert-frost-on-way-to-vietnam-jl.html