So You Think You ‘Get’ Robert Frost?
Robert Frost and his birthday cake once upon a time.
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Robert Frost, the poet who died in 1963, is having a moment. This February, a previously unpublished Frost poem turned up. (Ironically, it’s titled “Nothing New,” and is apparently “good.”) So did the latest in a growing stack of critical biographies. Frost, who won four Pulitzers, is both maligned and praised for his approachable, often plain-spoken poems. Approachable at least on the surface, that is. Adam Plunkett, author of Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry, will read at Powell’s City of Books Friday, March 21. His new book argues that this notoriously difficult man’s ostensibly rudimentary poems are still worth reading.
Written by Frost’s longtime friend Lawrance Thompson, the first major Frost biography came out in three volumes, the last of which was published in 1976, nearly three years after Thompson’s death. It paints Frost as a certified art monster: “more thoroughly self centered than any person I’ve ever known,” is one of Thompson’s choice lines. In contrast, a recent Washington Post review declares that Plunkett “reads Frost’s life like a responsible critic.” Hard to trust what that paper says these days, but others have similarly endorsed this latest bio. The New Yorker called Love and Need a “thorough” and “elegant” portrait of Frost as “a remarkably complex poet and a compelling but complicated man.”
David Orr’s book-length analysis of the most famous Frost poem, “The Road Not Taken,” made a similar splash in 2015. An excerpt ran in The Paris Review with the headline “The Most Misread Poem in America.” If you know a single Robert Frost poem, this is the one Orr is talking about (“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood”). In fact, as Orr makes clear with statistics, if you know any poem at all, it’s probably this one.
The Road Not Taken is often read, and co-opted by marketing campaigns, as an endorsement of taking “the road less traveled,” the hard way. It’s used to validate sweat equity, sell rough-and-tumble cars, perpetuate myths of American individuality. But, Orr points out, the poem can also be read to mean we only tell ourselves we took the more difficult path in retrospect. In fact, that dichotomy is quite the point. The more nuanced takeaway is that we rarely know whether we actually achieved something original or are merely gassing ourselves up after the fact.
Plunkett’s book takes a similar position, but applies it to all of Frost—man, poems, and persona. “[T]he wrongness is part of the point,” he told The Paris Review recently, “the temptation into believing, as in the speaker’s impression of himself, that you could form yourself by your decisions.” This quintessentially American idea, that an individual has the power to manifest their own destiny, might not be entirely untrue, but it’s certainly iffy.
More Things to Do This Week
music Danzig
6pm Wed, Mar 26 | Moda Center, $39–147+
“Tell your children not to walk my way,” Glenn Danzig sang, as a kiss-off to Tipper Gore’s censorship efforts with the Parents Music Resource Center, on his namesake band’s 1988 debut record. After disbanding horror punk outfit the Misfits, Danzig eventually formed Danzig the band as a sort of supergroup with help from producer Rick Rubin. He sings with a western, full-throated twang, despite being from New Jersey, which lends the songs an eerie and exciting danger: something between Elvis (he did a Danzig Sings Elvis tour in 2023) and Roy Orbison, but sung over doom metal. Gore’s group eventually won out, kind of. Danzig’s self-titled album wears a “Parental Advisory” warning label. But he’s still filling stadiums, nearly 40 years later, singing about showing mother and father what hell is like.
art Soft Pink Hard Line
Thru Apr 19 | Ily2, FREE
This group show collects work from 14 international artists, including Leena Similu, I Gusti Ayu Kadek Murniasih, Hannah Levy, and Amanda Ross-Ho, around the idea that a “hard line” can be juxtaposed, challenged even, by a soft, pink one: “subverting decisiveness in favor of sincerity,” the press release reads. Reserving the right to change your mind? Sort of, but more so that a flexible, or even empathetic line—a rule, position, boundary—is more powerful than a so-called “hard line,” the type of putting-your-foot-down one does at wit’s end.
theater Tootsie
Various times Mar 21–Apr 13 | Winningstad Theatre, $39
“[T]his is a world of Fosse [jazz] hands and himbos,” The New York Times wrote in 2019 of the Broadway musical adaptation of the ’80s Dustin Hoffman comedy. In the movie, Hoffman secretly auditions dressed as a woman for the star role of a soap opera because he can’t find acting work as a man. It goes swimmingly. Here, playwright Robert Horyn’s book, which won a Tony, swaps in a musical comedy for the soap. This local production comes from Stumptown Stages.
What We’re Reading About Elsewhere
- Warped Tour rocker turned city council member Jamie Dunphy’s ideas on how to restart the local music scene. (Portland Mercury)
- Portland-based photographer Susan Seubert’s dual vantages of melting icebergs. (Oregon ArtsWatch)
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