He knew a path that wanted walking;
He knew a spring that wanted drinking;
A thought that wanted further thinking;
A love that wanted re-renewing.
Nor was this just a way of talking
To save him the expense of doing.
From “A Lone Striker” by Robert Frost
W
hat makes Vermont such an
appealing state to writers?
According to Timothy
Consedine, the regional economist for
the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ New
England Information Office, a dispropor-
tionate number of writers and authors live
in Vermont relative to other states in the
country, ranking it within “the top five
states in terms of concentration of jobs
within this category.” Poets tend to hide in
the open in Vermont without much worry
of being recognized or harassed, which
makes most of them feel right at home. In
2010, when I interviewed Galway Kinnell,
I asked him why he had moved to
Sheffield, Vermont from New York in
1962; he responded, “the silence.”
A list of eminent Vermont poets betrays
Vermont’s embarrassment of literary
treasures, both past and present:
Robert Frost, Robert Penn Warren,
Galway Kinnell, Rudyard Kipling, Grace
Paley, Wyn Cooper, Martha Zweig, Louise
Gluck, Ruth Stone, Mary Ruefle, Hayden
Carruth, David Budbill, Ron Padgett,
Ellen Bryant Voigt, Major Jackson, Dennis
Nurkse, Paige Ackerson-Kiely, Leland
Kinsey, Jay Wright, Ben Bellitt, Karin
Gottshall, Verandah Porche, Jean Connor,
Walter Hard, Geof Hewitt, GennaRose
Nethercott, FD Reeve, Jim Schley, Jane
Shore, Dan Chiasson, Cleopatra Matthis,
Reuben Jackson, Cynthia Huntington, Jay
Parini, Rosanna Warren, Baron Wormser,
Diana Whitney, Peter Richards, Stephen
Cramer, Julia Randall. Vijay Seshadri,
Sydney Lea, David Hinton, Daisy Turner,
Lucy Terry Prince, Stephen Sandy, Bill
Corbet, James Schuyler, David Huddle,
Greg Delanty, Julia Alvarez, Bianca Stone,
Jody Gladding, Tim Mayo, Ben Pease,
Kerrin McCadden, Elizabeth Powell, Julia
Shipley, Neil Shephard, John Ashbery, Tim
Mayo, Alison Prine, Castle Freeman,
Partridge Boswell, Mary Jane Higginson,
and Norman Dubie, along with many
others.
When my predecessor as poet laureate,
Sydney Lea, and I ventured to edit an
anthology of contemporary Vermont poets
in 2015 titled Roads Taken: Contemporary
Vermont Poetry, we discovered more than
90 poets who had lived in Vermont for at
least five years and published one or more
books of poetry with a non-vanity press.
But then we discovered 12 more poets who
met our criteria a year later, prompting us
to put out a second edition. I’m sure, if our
publisher, Green Writers Press, is willing,
we will need to update with a third edition
in the not-too-distant future.
It’s impossible to appreciate Vermont’s
poetry without first appreciating the most
salient features of Vermont’s historical
character, namely, its denizens’ self-re-
liance, their perseverance, their mental
toughness, their ingenuity, their creativity,
their courage, and perhaps most famous-
ly, their contrariness. Although Vermont
has existed as a state since 1791, it wasn’t
until 1928 that President Calvin Coolidge
coined the phrase “brave little state” as a
moniker for lauding Vermont’s intrepid
heritage, particularly the Green Mountain
Boys’ surprising victories over the British
and Hessians during the Revolutionary
War, the early settlers’ godlike clearing of
old-growth forests (more than 80 percent
of the state’s woodlands) for grazing and
farming, the prodigious construction of
myriad stone walls, and the state’s first
legislators’ attempt under the leadership of
President Chittenden to declare Vermont
a sovereign republic rather than join the
union as the 14th state. So, it is no surprise
that several of Vermont’s poets would rise
to the occasion of capturing the dramas of
their fellow Vermonters’ fiercely inde-
pendent, larger-than-life enterprises, as
well as the empyreal beauty of Vermont’s
landscape. But this would take a while, a
century, in fact, before a truly great poet
would emerge with the gift to memorialize
Vermont’s “bravery” in poems destined to
outlast their own epoch.
This poet was, of course, Robert Frost, who
divined the reality of Vermont’s hardships,
ecstasies, griefs, loves, and terrain in
poems that have become ingrained in New
Englanders’ psyche, as well as readers of
poetry around the world. Vermont claimed
Frost as its first poet laureate in 1961,
despite the fact that he had also lived much
of his life in New Hampshire and titled
his 1923 Pulitzer Prize–winning book,
New Hampshire. In his long title poem
for this book, Frost concluded with these
characteristically ironic lines that appear
to betray his preference for Vermont over
New Hampshire as the state of his choice
for “living”:
It is restful to arrive at a decision
And restful just to think about
New Hampshire.
At present I am living in Vermont.
In his introduction to Roads Taken:
Contemporary Vermont Poetry, Dan
Chiasson, an accomplished Vermont poet
himself and the poetry critic for The New
Yorker, wrote this trenchant observation
about Frost as the instructional seer of the
Green Mountain State: “Frost’s poems are
the great rural instructional manual for
our neck of the woods. His influence is
everywhere…which so often take ‘nature’
not as an idyllic refuge, but a site of careful,
strenuous, and repeated steps of action.”
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