Jokes at Robert Frost’s Expense
Robert Frost is a poet I love to hate, and I think this has less to do with Frost himself and more to do with the way the American k-12 educational system forced his work upon me.
“The road not taken” — not. fucking. possible.
If the road exists, then someone, I don’t know who,
maybe the person who made the road, has in fact,
taken said road.
I also feel enough time has passed since Frost died that I can make jokes about him — like the one I made at All Souls’, among friends, that had to do with Robert Frost, his mama, his poetry, and abortion.
You can probably parse this “joke” given the set of details provided.
Maybe I took it too far.
Maybe Robert Frost doesn’t deserve all the mean things I say about him, but as per usual, it’s not really about one person (in this case Robert Frost), rather it’s about systems.
Systems like ones that are still serving Robert Frost to children.
As the Millennials like to say, “that’s not okay.”
This weekend, friends were in town for the All Souls’ Procession, and I did not drink.
I went to a crowded event at night where the liquor was flowing like the Colorado River, and I did not drink.
Me. Those who know me/knew me prior to 250 days ago know what I’m talking about. Or maybe not because there was a part of my alcoholism that was utterly, insidiously hidden and secretive.
Because that’s what alcoholism was about for me: hiding from all the shit I could solve if I actually had the guts to face it and
about flattening the feelings that arose from the shit I could not, and still cannot, solve.
When I got sober, it was as though I sorted my shit into two piles:
one big shit pile for all the intractable, immutable shit I can’t do shit about, and
another, much smaller, pile for shit that is moveable and mine.
And then I began the, at times Sisyphean, task of clearing shit out of my shit pile in the hopes that someday my inner life will become a clean, reflective surface.
But I can’t do anything about any shit when I’m shitfaced.
And I can’t do it thinking like an Alcoholic, which is to say thinking
that everything is hopeless, pointless, and against me, personally.
There are systems that are definitely not designed with my personal health and wellbeing in mind, for sure, but I could not rationally “sort” systems from individuals while I was actively in my alcohol issue.
I mean, I could conduct this sort of analysis on an intellectual level, but I hadn’t convinced my heart that my sharp critical focus was best when strictly applied to paradigms, not people. (Save for Bob Frost. He gets all the sharp critical focus from me.)
And when I got my heart to finally agree with my intellect, I started to change. Harmony. It’s all about that damn, elusive harmony — body and mind, heart and soul, tomato and tomato.
My painful feelings and challenging life situations did not disappear,
but they no longer have constant and absolute power over the way I experience and conduct my life.
When I do grudge math, where I add up all my problems, all my struggles, present, past, and possibly future, I feel a certain set of feelings that I do not enjoy. For this reason, I try not to do grudge math unless absolutely necessary. In the past, I did almost nothing but grudge math. For someone as math adverse as me, I sure did like to add up the ways life had done me dirty. And life has done me dirty. You, too, reader. We all have our shit piles.
So I did grudge math and I drank and I drank so that I could have my feelings, but not feel my feelings. And see, the feeling of the feelings is key, I’ve discovered, to not being destroyed by spiritual and emotional pain. Physical pain is something different. I am happy that I have no physical pain today.
Instead of drinking, I try to keep myself in Actual Reality and chill-the-fuck-out-sometimes and do things like enjoy a guilt-free day off.
Why yes, I do feel guilty when I take days off because I am tired as middle aged woman being treated for stage iv cancer, and why yes, I do feel guilty when I take days off work for doctors appointments and “whatnot” related to my having stage iv cancer.
I have a guilt issue, and so do you, reader.
We all have guilt issues just by virtue of living in this fucked up country.
Guilt is a feeling that does not serve me.
Guilt is pretty fucking useless, actually.
Guilt was a chip implanted in our American brains to make us compliant.
One can make right, good, just, healthy choices without factoring in “guilt.”
And as a white American queer, female, recovering alcoholic, recovering catholic, and recovering capitalist, I know a little something about the utter impotence of guilt.
Fuck guilt.
What about remorse?
What about repentance?
What about reparations?
(The latter I mean figuratively, and as always in the literal way that Black Americans are even by the most secular of morality entitled to Reparations. If you disagree we are probably not friends IRL, and therefore your opinion on this matters not to me.)
Before I got sober, I wanted every unpleasant feeling I felt to go away as quickly as possible and by any means necessary.
And I hated the size and scope of my feelings.
And I didn’t understand that my big, complicated, messy feelings were an integral, critical part of the gifts I’d been leaning into all my life for both survival and joy. My feelings were like bees: kind of cute sometimes, and also super fucking annoying sometimes, and sometimes they sting, and sometimes we just don’t want these fucking bees here, and from my limited-Egocentric-human-perspective I couldn’t really internalize why the fuck I needed to have all these goddamn bees around constantly.
And yet these seemingly insignificant, largely annoying bee herd (I said what I said) is an integral part of my limited-and-actual-human-existence.
We need the bees, and we need our feelings.
Even the ones that sting.
Even the ones that are not cute (and trust, I’ve seen some “not-cute-but-necessary” bees down here in the American borderlands — literally, figuratively).
Old Me only wanted “some” feelings.
She wanted the feelings that helped her be a good teacher, a good employee, a good writer, a good friend, a fun and charming presence at social engagements.
She wanted the feelings she could show off, be proud of, use for making money, and wanted to drown the feelings that, however true, were neither beautiful nor utilitarian outside of her own needs, and she didn’t want to face her needs because when she faced her needs she had to face a lot of pain and so she drank and for a few hours, the drinking would soften the edges of the painful feelings. And though the feelings might present with her when she was drinking, she was not really feeling the feelings and acknowledging them in such a way that they could ever stop reproducing or, heaven forbid, become resolved.
And it’s hard to be happy and content when you’re walking around with a headful of unresolved, endlessly replicating pain.
Call me crazy, call me old fashioned, I know this will be very controversial, but I do not think human beings are supposed to live in a state of chronic misery and rage.
If I’m being honest, most days, I am mostly happy and content.
There are problems in my life, yes.
There are problems in all lives.
Even that prickly pear at the backend of our yard has its good and bad days, and its chronic challenges.
The Buddhists are right, you gotta admit, life is suffering.
That does not mean “life is insufferable” or “you must always suffer” or “fuck it, let’s smoke some meth.”
On the contrary, what this means is that life is suffering and life is joy and life is beauty and life is grief and life is weird and life is hilarious and forever. And we can choose to focus only on the suffering, but our focus on the suffering will not make it go away entirely. My primary purpose in life, these days, is to alleviate suffering: mine and that of those who must be around me. My tools are human and therefore limited, somewhat blunted, and often deeply inadequate. But like the guy at the Circle K by my house says, “It’s cool, baby.” (Sometimes he also says, “Stay cool, baby” or “Be cool, my baby.” However he says it, I find myself specifically patronizing that gas station for my fuel and lazy sundry needs because I like the “Cool, baby” cashier.)
Today, I have what I need.
Today, I have the gift of a day off that is not a sick day or a doctor’s appointment day or a PET scan day or a surgery day.
Today, I have no pain in my body.
And today I know that there is no feeling I could ever have that alcohol will alleviate. Today, I know that I am a fragile, complex ecosystem of feelings, and of big ideas, and scientific facts, and of small ideas, and of ends, and of beginnings.
Veteran’s Day. I know a lot of veterans. I love a lot of the veterans I know. I have a lot of problems with the American Military. I am fiercely anti-war, despise violence even under the auspices of “freedom.” I understand fully why we have a military and why so many Americans sign up for duty. And I tip my hat to anyone who chooses to risk their one precious life for an ideal, or feels they must choose this route because there is no other way. And for those who truly enjoy their military career, okay, then. Good on ya.
A colleague recently referred to me as a “veteran teacher” and it took me aback a little to hear that word applied to me (because it also means “old”), and then I felt super proud like “hell yeah, I am a veteran teacher, fuckers.”
Out for dinner on Monday, my friends and I, all educators, discussed how the profession has changed since the pandemic began. We grieved American education as we had known it, and we shared our hopes for the future of American education. None of us at the table was under forty. All of us had been “in the game,” so-to-speak, for the better halves of our respective lives. All of us gravitated toward the profession because we believed in and loved the work the profession demands. All of us, at times this year, have considered leaving our profession because of the seemingly insurmountable challenges (some fixable, others intractable) that are now a part of all our American lives. All of us agreed we had a moral obligation to, at the very least, see this current academic year through — as professionals, as people who take pride in their work, as people who give a damn about other people, specifically kids.
And this is a calling for me. And maybe someday I’ll reach a point where my body really can’t do this work anymore, and I’ll have to feel my feelings when that day comes, and today is not that day. And I strongly suspect tomorrow is not that day, either.
And this brings me back to Robert Frost, the poet I love to hate.
Why in holy hell would you teach Robert Frost in k-12 schools when you have 1) better living poets and 2) better dead poets.
In ELA, my students are learning about James Baldwin, and about close reading through studying a quote from one of Baldwin’s essays. I’ve discussed (and certainly shared) the quote here.
James Baldwin. Why in the world would anyone teach Frost to children when there is James Baldwin? Even though Baldwin was a cultural critic, an essayist, not a “poet,” he was still an infinitely better poet than Robert Frost. At least James Baldwin makes sense.
Anyway, I recently read a Baldwin quote from an interview he gave in the 60s (I believe). The interviewer asked Baldwin if he was “still” in “despair about the world” and this was Baldwin’s reply: “I never have been in despair about the world. I’ve been enraged by it. I don’t think I’m in despair. I can’t afford despair. I can’t tell my nephew, my niece. You can’t tell the children there’s no hope.”
The first day of the online school year (2020–2021), I greeted a room of middle schoolers enrolled in Intro to Creative Writing (a class in which we never studied Robert Frost) by delivering my best “Good Morning, Vietnam!” only I said, “Goood morning, Creative Writers!” and then I played Skee-Lo, specifically this song, while I took attendance.
The kids really liked this song and it became a permanent resident of my While-I-take-attendance-on-Zoom Spotify Playlist which was basically a collection of “clean” (no swears, no overt sex, no overt violence) music my students and I could both agree upon.
And I remember that first day of Zoom teaching, I felt such hope. I wasn’t sober yet, and I didn’t know that part of my life was coming, but when I look back I can see the signs of change that were there even that morning, in August of 2020, when I logged onto a computer from our home in Flagstaff, and greeted my students who were also on their computers, in their homes, in and around Flagstaff. And we listened to Skee-Lo and all agreed that this song, though old, was still quite good. And I like to think it set a tone for some of the year, that some of the year would be (and was) a little fun, a little silly, a little catchy.
Though I was full of careful optimism, the 2020–2021 school year did not reveal itself the way I hoped or predicted. However, all the crazy nonsense that went down during the 2020 -2021 year inspired me to change. And for a lot of us, I think, the 2020–2021 year made clear(er) what we want and don’t want, what we will, and will not tolerate in this life.
For me, 2020–2021 made clearer a set of choices I was making (internal and external) that were not doing me, or those close to me, any favors.
(Is that “litotes”?
I always had to teach this stupid fucking term — litotes — for AP coursework and always felt I was teaching the concept a little “wrong.”
AP always made me, as a teacher, feel inadequate.
Turns out AP makes students feel inadequate, too.
That’s like the whole point of AP: to make everyone in education feel like shit while making money for College Corp.)
In conclusion, 250 days into this little “sobriety experiment” my life is easier to navigate. I enjoy having days off that are not for sickness or doctor’s appointments. Robert Frost’s poetry is worse than a PET scan.
