Home

     "Home," Robert Frost once wrote, "is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in."
     From his heartbreaking "The Death of the Hired Man," a short story, really, a farm couple sitting on the front porch, talking about Silas, the ne'er-do-well who works for them, sometimes. A refutation to all those who dismiss Frost as a greeting card poet of snowy evenings and yellow woods. (Along with "Out, Out—" a poem about a boy who feeds his hand into a buzz saw — though the saw practically grabs it, after the boy is called to supper, "As if to prove saws knew what supper meant/Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap—")
     Dire things — and poems I've addressed before — at cross purpose with my holiday mood. There are of course happier interpretations of "home." It is the place where you walk in, drop your bags, and — even after an absence of seven months and the arrival of big changes — still immediately stick your head into the refrigerator to see what there is good to eat. Even with a freshly baked cranberry bread waiting on the counter. A ritual of familiarity, and comfort. Things change. But at home — another definition — the grinding gears of time are thwarted, for now. The familiar brands in the refrigerator. The old crib you slept in, a gorgeous rich blue, bought in the city at Lazar's, now magically returned from its sojourn with other relatives. Set up in your old bedroom, under the chess trophies, fitted with fresh sheets, ready for a new generation, home also being the place where you grow up.

Flashback 2000: In the best poetry, there is love, horror — and truth

     Robert Bly died Sunday. My generation remembers him as the author of "Iron John," the book about mythical archetypes that suggest men somehow aren't self-absorbed enough, and need to go out into the woods together and beat drums and howl. Some did that, while the rest of us hooted in ridicule. 

     I was looking for some reference to Bly in the vault, and found this, which sets the stage for the Uptown Poetry Slam, which starts back up this Sunday at 3 p.m. at the Green Mill after its forced COVID hiatus. I plan to be there, and may even be enticed to say a few words.

     My mother writes poetry sometimes. Perhaps all mothers do. Since she is almost certainly reading this, courtesy of the Internet, it would be prudent for me to say that she writes "wonderful poetry." But that would be pandering to my audience, or at least one member of it.
     The fact is — and I must be delicate here — her poetry is not the sort of writing that echoes in one's head forever. I dutifully read the neatly penned pieces that she occasionally tucks in her letters, praise them modestly in our next telephone conversation and forget them.
     Except for one line, a single sentence, written maybe 10 years ago. My mother began a tribute to her own mother this way:

     "She achieved the fame we all seek."
     I love that line, because it is the perfect, pithy encapsulation of who my grandma Sarah was: the star of her world of poker-playing department store clerks, the cynosure of the Jewish Singing Society.
     I never forgot the line because it is true, and truth is the entire point of poetry. To say true things, briefly.
     I don't believe many people understand this. They feel that, rather than being about truth, poetry is just a flowery nothing, an embarrassing waste. Men feel this particularly. Poetry is in the queasy realm of tea shoppes and dance recitals and all the ruffled stuff that a guy just naturally keeps a big distance from because he won't enjoy them. Poetry is not only lousy, it's feminine.
     There's a point in there, somewhere. Most poetry is lousy, just as most books and movies are. But that doesn't mean that it all is, and it doesn't explain why you get all sorts of junk in your e-mail — jokes and urban legends and lists of trivia — but never a poem.
     People just don't think about poetry. The occasional poetry popularizer — such as smarmy Robert Bly with his stupid drumming seminars in the woods — just end up presenting verse as maudlin, syrupy slop for fools.
     It doesn't have to be. Take Robert Frost. The most famous poet of the 20th century and — the way we're going — the 21st century, too. "The Road Not Taken" is the script of a Monster.com commercial gaining attention recently, for the creepy way pedestrians loom out of a busy downtown street to say a line of the poem, one of Frost's most well-known, the one that ends: 

       Two roads diverged in a wood, and I

        I took the one less traveled by

       And that has made all the difference.

     Of course pairing the poem with a commercial venture turns it into something of a lie, by suggesting that we, too, can be independent spirits, if only we follow everybody else to Monster.com, the career Web site.
     That particular poem also feeds the common image of Frost's work — assuming people have an image — as being all about yellow woods in Vermont covered in maple syrup and cool stone walls.
     But Frost is not the Currier and Ives print that people think of him as. Just as fans of Norman Rockwell — during his recent revival — tried to give him hip legitimacy by pointing to his stark civil rights canvases, so I will sally to Frost's defense, in honor of today's anniversary of his birth in 1874, by pointing out there is much more to him than scenic postcards of Stowe.
     The day Frost was born, his father — a journalist — brandished a pistol at the attending doctor and told him that if anything went wrong, he was a dead man. And death looms over the best of Frost's poetry.
     In my favorite, "The Death of the Hired Man," a weary farm couple sit on a stoop, discussing the old farmhand who has suddenly returned.
     "What good is he?" the farmer asks. "Who else will harbor him; At his age for the little he can do?; What help he is there's no depending on ; Off he goes always when I need him most."
     Casually, the man or the wife — it's hard to tell which — tosses off one of those stark, universal truths that make poetry worth reading:

     "Home is the place where, when you have to go there,

      They have to take you in."

     Frost broke with all the giddy, Emersonian naturalists of the past and presented a world grimmer than people were used to reading about in verse, but no grimmer than the world actually is.
     While I had my anthology out, I tried, once again, to read "Out, Out — " without choking up and, again, just couldn't do it.
     In the brief poem, Frost recounts the scene of a boy sawing firewood with a buzz saw in the yard. The boy's sister calls him to supper and the buzz saw:

     As if to prove saws knew what supper meant, 

     Leaped out at the boy's hand, or seemed to leap — 

     He must have given the hand. However it was,

      Neither refused the meeting. . . .

     The poem has the matter-of-fact horror of a Stephen King novel and, at 34 lines, tells a tale as well as one of King's bulked-up tomes.
     It ends without a whiff of sentiment, illustrating the gulf between the lucky living, like us, and those like Frost, or the boy, whose death only fleetingly alarms those around him. "And they, since they were not the one dead, turned to their affairs."
     We remember Frost's half century of celebrity but, on his birthday, we should also recall both his words and his struggle to express those words. Robert Frost was 39 years old when he published his first book.
                —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 26, 2000

Where is your home?

Child's sidewalk drawing, Northbrook, 2017

     "Home," wrote Robert Frost, in his heartbreaking poem "Death of a Hired Man," "is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." 
      It's a fraught sentence, with more going on under the surface than might immediately appear. It has the perspective of youth built in. Implied is the prodigal, all possibilities squandered, arriving unwelcome on his familiar doorstep. The door is half opened, by a powerful arm. A surprised, almost angry glare. Then a sigh. A step back, the door now open all the way. Welcome home.

  Frost was 40—his birthday was this past Sunday—when the poem was published, in his collection "North of Boston" in 1914, for which he collected one of his four Pulitzer Prizes. Forty hovers between the man who shows up at the door and the man who opens it—Frost had already had his six children by then, and seen two of them die. If you haven't read the poem, you should do so now by clicking on the link above, as nothing here will reward your time like that will. 
    It's told mostly in dialogue, the cadences of New England: Ezra Pound thought it Frost's best poem. Though it isn't about the return of a son, but a broken down farm employee with no where else to go.
     I've always taken that line out and repurposed it, which you are allowed to do. It's my favorite line from Frost, who gets a bad rap, for "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening" with its village and little horse and the woods, "lovely, dark and deep," not to mention those two roads diverging into a yellow wood. Based on that, he's thought of as sort of the poetic Norman Rockwell. Though, like Rockwell, he is judged harshly by what the crowd embraced.  And just as Rockwell came out slugging for civil rights, so there is "Out, Out" about a boy who cuts his hand off in a buzz saw. Frost saw poetry as starting in something real.
     A poem, he said, is “never a put-up job.... It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a loneliness. It is never a thought to begin with. It is at its best when it is a tantalizing vagueness.”  

    "A sense of wrong ... a tantalizing vagueness." Lot of that going around lately.  Living in Northbrook for the past 16 years, it of course is my home, at least officially, technically. And while I am fond of the 1905 Queen Anne farmhouse where we live and raised our boys, when I walk to the park downtown, and sit on a bench, regarding the stillness, I can't say I feel that this is my home. Which raises the question: if not here, then where? Where might home be? My parents are both alive, in Boulder, and though I've been visiting there since 1973, Boulder certainly isn't home. Nor is Berea, Ohio, where I grew up, though I do love to go back, and can't help but notice we could buy four similar houses there for what our house costs here. 
    Digging deeper, I suppose home is where my wife is. That makes sense. Even on a Metra car, riding the train to work in the morning, has a warm, comfortable, sleepover feel with us shoulder to shouler, reading the papers in companionable silence. If not that, then home has to be something I'm still looking for, the impulse that caused me to set my sails at 18 and drift away in the first place. I'm assuming I'll know it when I see it. But maybe not. 

Don't be afraid: it's just poetry

     The great Gene Weingarten, the Washington Post's two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, called me out over this column in a Twitter exchange (from Aussie hookers to the best columnist working—I piss off 'em all). Actually, he wasn't mad, just questioned whether something could be poetry if it doesn't rhyme. I answered an emphatic "YES!" but he held his ground. There is no accounting for taste, and I'm trying to forget that he finds "Death of the Hired Man" by Robert Frost to be tripe. To me this is all a quibble over semantics: poems are what people call poems.

     Friday was cold and windy. Getting dressed for the Cubs home opener, I thought: better put on my Under Armour. Which is usually reserved for skiing or when it’s 15 below zero. But I worried that high-tech long johns were overkill, so I fired off an email to a Cub fan buddy, who would be at the game. Is wearing long underwear to the ballpark in April, I asked, a “prudent precaution” or a “shameful stratagem?”

     You’ll notice the alliteration in that question. Not an accident. “Prudent precaution” came naturally, then I paused, searching for the right “s” word to put after “shameful.”

     Not poetic, of course, but a reminder that we can all use language to decorate and enhance the most ordinary moments of our lives, like checking with a pal to see if wearing long underwear to Wrigley Field will mark a guy as a weakling. (“I will be wearing mine,” he answered, a reply I was grateful for when the wind picked up and the temperature dropped after the sixth).

     Cut to the next day, around Sheffield and Fullerton, I noticed the sleek Pegasus logo of the Poetry Foundation on a placard atop a taxi cab. Oh right. April is National Poetry Month, and while the commencement of baseball is marked in Chicago with pomp, solemnity and mass ritual, events like Poetry Month are shrugged off by the vast majority, which is just plain wrong. 

     First, poetry is important. Yes, as with long underwear, there is a whiff of effeminacy to it that many guys find off-putting. A cultural slur you’d think we would have abandoned long ago. Soldiers write poetry, not only a century ago, such as  Wilfred Owen’s classic “Dulce et Decorum Est,” about a World War I gas attack (Go online and read it right now, “As under a green sea, I saw him drowning/In all my dreams, before my helpless sight/He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.”) 

     But also soldiers fighting today. Brian Turner, in his collection “Here, Bullet” sees a sergeant shoot a crane in Iraq. "It pauses, as if amazed death has found it/here, at 7 a.m. on such a beautiful morning, before pitching over the side and falling/in a slow unraveling of feathers and wings."
     Second, poetry is useful. It's a tool, like a screwdriver or a hammer. Though I suppose that depends on who you are. If you are Mr. Equanimity, smiling at the clouds as you stroll happily along, your neighbors setting their watches as you pass by, well, maybe the stuff has not much use for you.
     Even then, there are always lighter poets, like Billy Collins, who runs up to the reader waving his poem like a 6-year-old showing off a new toy. "To take a poem/and hold it up to the light/like a color slide/or press an ear against its hive./I say drop a mouse into a poem/and watch him probe his way out."
     Me, being a dark sort, I've been revelling in the poems of Louise Glück, such as "Stars." She inventories her scant world. "I have a bed, a vase/of flowers beside it,/ and a nightlight, a book." Life itself questions her: "Do you dare/send me away as though/you were waiting for something better?/There is no better/Only (for a short space)/the night sky . . ." To which she hisses back: " I was brave, I resisted,/I set myself on fire."
     And third, Chicago is a poetry town. Do you think Wrigley Field, built in 1914, is old? Poetry Magazine was founded here in 1912 by Harriet Monroe, and has fielded better players and enjoyed a better past century.
     Chicago is a city not only with statues to poets such as Goethe, but with an apartment building and a parking garage named for poets. There is the Uptown Poetry Slam at the Green Mill on Sundays, now in its 27th year, and why that isn't a standard Chicago tourist stop along with Wrigley and the Art Institute is an utter mystery. There is the Poetry Foundation itself, which put up its airy and attractive building on West Superior to help sop up the Lilly $100 million fortune that drenched it, a dubious boon they've coped with better than expected.
     There is nothing superfluous about good poetry. It guides and instructs. I picked up "Leaves of Grass" a 150-year-old poem, and read one sentence that resonates today.
     "And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy," Walt Whitman writes, "walks to his own funeral, dressed in his shroud."
     That's it, I thought. That's what our political problem is right now. Not enough sympathy —for other people, that is. We overflow with sympathy for ourselves and puzzle that others don't share it, when we are so stingy doling it out. Maybe we should take our cue from Whitman and pause from marching graveward to cast off our blinding burial cloth, force ourselves to feel compassion for the other guy, even if we don't like him. Here poetry helps, or could help, if only we let it.

A half-inch tall, tree-gobbling Godzilla

Emerald ash borer-damaged tree on Bryn Mawr Avenue in Chicago.

If you love trees -- and I do -- then the arrival of the emerald ash borer is a calamity. Actually, you don't have to love trees to grieve the billions of dollars that will be spent to fight the borer and repair the damage, the streets marred for years. It is extra personal for me because the one tree that has done the best in my yard is a lovely cimmaron ash planted a dozen years ago to replace a tree destroyed in the micro-burst of 2000. It's taller than the house now, and it kills me that a half inch beetle will probably spell doom for it. The tree is slightly set apart at the side of the house, and my hope is that if I keep treating it, the borer will kill all the surrounding ash trees, and then die off with them and somehow spare mine.  Futile, I know.

     That said, despite my personal interest, I'd have never thought to explore the borer situation in Chicago in detail. But my editor asked me to, and I was happy to comply, if unhappy at what I found. The news is not good: 

City worker Arce Vales inoculates an ash tree in Chicago. 

     A beautiful autumn purple ash tree stands on the west side of St. Louis Avenue, a few steps south of Bryn Mawr.
     It is healthy, so far — a little woodpecker damage — but if you want to see the grim fate awaiting this tree and every one of the 85,000 ashes on public streets in Chicago, all you need do is look west, where a few feet away stand two ash trees ravaged by the emerald ash borer, the blight that arrived from China a dozen years ago, landing in Michigan in 2002, and has been eating its way southward since, decimating ash trees in the Midwest — 20 million trees have been killed so far in Michigan, Illinois, Indiana and Iowa — and causing billions of dollars in damage.
     An estimated 1 million trees in the greater Chicago area will be dead within five years if not treated, and the blight might end up costing $50 billion nationwide by the time it runs its course, when you factor in the expense of treating healthy trees — chemical inoculations will keep the beetle away, but they must be repeated every few years — plus removing diseased trees and replacing them, plus lowered property values on suddenly treeless streets.
     The bark of a blighted tree on Bryn Mawr is pulled off with a gentle tug by John Lough, one of the city of Chicago’s four full-time foresters, to reveal the telltale S-shaped trails the borer nibbles.
     Beside financial cost, the infestation is an ecological disaster.
     “It is,” he said, “widespread throughout the city.”
     Before the frost, the city finished inoculating 37,000 trees against the ash borer. Some municipalities have given up on their ash trees; not Chicago.
     "The benefits we receive from our ash trees are immense," Lough said. "They make a huge contribution to the urban canopy. We'd like to save as many as we can, to preserve the environmental benefits. We're really fortunate this year for Mayor Emanuel's insightfulness and environmental connection to the situation. If he hadn't done anything, these would all be gone."
     The treatment lasts for two years. The 20-year-old autumn purple ash on St. Louis, in front of a sign for Northeastern University's campus, is still hearty, and last month park district worker Arce Vales knelt and drilled eight holes around its base.
      She injected three pressurized puffs into each hole.
     Vales was hired in January, one of 37 inoculators who have been going around the city treating ash trees.
     Another 37,000 ash will be inoculated in the spring, and if you do the math, you'll notice that 10,000 ash trees will not be treated because they are too far gone. They'll have to come down.
     In Illinois, tree experts have been watching the blight march southward.
     "Basically the northern third of the state is infested," said Jeff Squib, a spokesman for the Illinois Department of Agriculture.
     He said the beetle was first found in Kane County in 2008, but whether that was because the infestation started there or because that's where the ag department has its DeKalb nursery program to notice it is an open question. The ash borer cannot fly far, and much of its quick spread is thought to be because of human activity, such as transporting firewood. The borer was just detected in Colorado, for instance.
     "It didn't fly to Boulder," said Stephanie Adams, a research specialist in plant health care at the Morton Arboretum. "Humans are a really big problem when it comes to invasive species."
     The city of Chicago has 560,000 trees on public land; 17 percent are ash. But those are just the city's trees; the Chicago region has an estimated 12 million trees, and 8 percent of those are ash - a million trees.
     And if that seems like a big share for one kind of tree, some communities have twice that: in Arlington Heights and Wheaton, a third of the trees are ash.
     Other towns are feeling a budget squeeze; Evanston couldn't keep pace with the speed of the borer invasion and cut down 500 trees without yet replacing them. Hanover Park cut down 1,100 ash and so far has planted only 100 replacements.
     But then varying tree selection is not something communities did well before the emerald ash borer. Despite previous historic blights such as Dutch elm disease or, more recently, the Asian longhorn beetle, which attacked maples, the lesson was not learned. Ash are cheap, fast-growing and pretty; some subdivisions around Chicago are 90 percent ash
     When you project what this half-inch bug is going to do nationwide, the cost of treatment, removal and replacement becomes enormous.
     "I've heard figures of $47 billion nationwide," said Scott Schirmer, manager of the Illinois Department of Agriculture's Emerald Ash Borer Program.
     The cost to each community can be considerable. Five years ago Carol Stream set aside $2.25 million to deal with ash-borer related problems.
     Of course, what the cost is depends on what strategy is taken. Cut your ash down now and get new trees going? Or treat them and allow residents to enjoy them as long as they can?
     Now that the Chicago area is infested, ash trees are considered doomed over the long haul.
     "If an area has an infestation, all ash in that area will eventually succumb to the beetle," Squib said. "Once you start the treatments, you need to continue them. It's not a one-time treatment. You also need to realize eventually the tree will succumb to the beetle. Some homeowners will prefer to prolong the tree's life and therefore their enjoyment of it. Others will prefer immediate removal of the tree and replace it. Eventually, the beetles will move to the treated tree. But who knows? In some respects you're buying time, treating the tree to fend off the beetle. Perhaps an effective treatment will be discovered."
     Some communities are not bothering to inoculate their ashes at all, deciding it is only expensively postponing the inevitable. Some are inoculating, but not to save the trees, just to stagger their removal and not have expanses of dead ashes.
     "There's been a lot of questions whether treatment is worth it," Adams said.
     You can't be in the tree business and not look at the long haul, and arborists are trying to do that when it comes to the emerald ash borer. Some communities are passing ordinances to prevent one type of tree from dominating their streetscapes ever again and perhaps fall victim to some future scourge on par with the borer. They're also trying to change residents' aesthetic view: For centuries, people admired uniform canopies of trees. With the risk of a whole genus of trees being wiped out by invasive predators, that might be a luxury that communities can no longer afford.
     "All the same color, all the same size. You need to look at it from a dynamic viewpoint," Schirmer said. "[This crisis is] really providing an opportunity to make streets more interesting. A lot of residents live in the now, versus arborists, who have to look 20 or 30 years down the line."

But does it have to be as lovely as a tree?

     I like poetry. The Poetry Foundation, well, I try to like them too. It can be hard, because they're a foundation, and something about foundations is antithetical to the poetic spirit, the way that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland doesn't embody rock and roll so much as entomb it. They do try to get poetry out there, though I wish they made more of an effort to occasionally have some kind of edge; buy a round of drinks at the Poetry Slam, something. Still, I like to keep tabs on them. They're good at heart. I didn't plan on touting their favorite poem er, "event"—I just stopped by to meet the new boss, Robert Polito. But the favorite poem thingy hasn't been announced yet —you read it here first, folks! —so I thought I would ballyhoo the con... whoops, something-close-to-but-not-quite-a-contest. (Isn't that the problem in a nutshell? That they won't call their contest a "contest." Too much foundation and not enough poetry). Then I got hung up on the fact that they're asking people to make the effort to write about their favorite poems, but aren't giving any prizes, other than to appear in their video. Any local saloon would dig up prizes. It seemed chintzy. 

     If you asked me to name my favorite poet, I’d be hard-pressed. I mean, yes, I keep trotting out Dante, but the dour Florentine can be heavy lifting. I’d hate to be forced to balance my affection for him against, say, Walt Whitman, lustily grabbing the reader around the neck with one hand and drawing him close, while the other hand — well, ahem, never you mind.

     But could I pick Whitman over Mary Oliver? Willow leaves in her hair, swallows fluttering around her head like a Disney heroine? A poem of hers in your pocket is like an aluminum bottle of cold water jiggling on your belt as you set out on a hike in the forest. You’re glad it’s there and even gladder when you pause to take a long, soul-satisfying pull.

    Does she really trump Rilke? Or Virgil? Or John Berryman, addressing the Lord? “I fell back in love with you, Father, for two reasons: / You were good to me, & a delicious author...”

     No matter. The Poetry Foundation isn’t even asking for your favorite poet — that would be hard enough. They’re asking for your favorite poem, in the about-to-be-announced Favorite Poem Contest: Chicago, reviving the contest that Robert Pinsky held when he was America’s Poet Laureate.
     Is that even possible? "Favorite" has to be time specific. Favorite now. Favorite at the moment. For a long time my favorite poem was Robert Browning's "Andrea del Sarto," the ambling, melancholy justification of a painter who was merely excellent, rationalizing why he wasn't a Michelangelo. "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, / Or what's a heaven for?"
     But did I like that better than Robert Frost's "The Death of the Hired Man," a novel compressed in a few pages, with lines never to be forgotten: "Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in."
     I learned about the contest after stopping by the Poetry Foundation's spare, elegant West Superior clubhouse to meet its new president, poet and scholar Robert Polito. He took exception to my suggestion that poetry squats on the outer margins of our culture.
     "It's hard to say exactly where poetry is," he said. "It would seem a lot of people would say it's on the periphery, it used to be more important. In a lot of ways, there's never been a better moment to be a poet and to be a reader of poetry than right now."
     He cited the explosion of small presses, local poetry scenes and books of poetry.
     "There's an enormous amount of poetry in the culture," he said.
     Further boosting poetry into the mainstream, from Oct. 15 through Nov. 15, the foundation is inviting Chicagoans from all walks of life to write about a poem they love and why they love it.
     Five entries will be chosen to participate in a video that will debut on the foundation website in January. And that's it — no prizes, as this is not a contest, for reasons I'm sure are dull and unpoetic and involve lawyers. (I did try my best. "C'mon," I told them. "You gotta have prizes. A coffee cup, a T-shirt. Something.")
     Still, entering isn't difficult. In fact, I'll go first. My favorite poem is ... "Leaves of Grass." It has to be, Whitman's bold, brilliant, timeless ode to the bounty and promise of America. Particularly the part where Whitman, who spent the Civil War as a nurse tending wounded soldiers, ministers to the reader.
     "O despairer, here is my neck," he says, practically leaning over your bed. "By God! You shall not go down! Hang your whole weight upon me."
     Whitman nearly clamps his lips over yours, filling your lungs with air.
     "I dilate you with tremendous breath ... I buoy you up; Every room of the house do I fill with an armed force ... lovers of me, bafflers of the graves; Sleep! I and they keep guard all night."
     I always smile at Uncle Walt and his motley band of mid-19th century inverts, in their floppy Jed Clampett hats frayed and homespun, toting Sharps rifles, taking up strategic spots around my house, dutiful midnight sentries. He wrote it to strengthen, and it does, every time.
     That's mine. What's your favorite poem? Don't tell me; tell the foundation, starting Oct. 15: poetryfoundation.org. Good luck.