BY JOELLEN COLLINS
When I moved from Ketchum, Idaho, to Walnut Creek, California, I had to dismantle my wall full of books that reminded me always of the richness I had teaching and being with friends who read. I gave away or donated almost all of them.
Many of the books I kept are poetry. I enjoy my easy access to poems that I remember or have not yet read and want to explore without having to go to a site. I can relax, encountering new poetry by authors I’ve liked before and thrilling new ones. Not only am I craving reading poetry, I am beginning to go back to the time when I wrote much more of it than I do now. I have kept my own writing from over the years (some published, some not) but my thin box of poetry seems the most representative of my long life, helping to understand why I have become the person I am now. I am interested in positive and joyful experiences with, of course, surviving the emotions of sadness and dismay I have in our scary world. I search for the most intense and meaningful way that I can express myself. Thus, I have started writing poetry again.
I’m very happy rereading so many poems that are my most favorite: one of them is always “Birches,” by Robert Frost. I recall discussing it years ago after attending the Bread Loaf Writers Conference (near Middlebury, Vermont, right by “The Road Not Taken” location). This poem has the intensity and the perfection of specific sensory impressions and fresh ways of looking at things that remain intensely affecting. The poem is a paean to his countryside in winter frost, describing living in an environment of extreme cold and long winters. “Birches” is about the guts to survive isolation and winter and life in general. I highly recommend it.
The poem is about a young boy (Frost) who is grappling with loneliness. Because he is not near other boys for play and has to find ways to feed his fancies and his energy, he likes to climb birch trees and bend the branches way down, crawling far to the edges so that they are “trailing their leaves on the ground like girls on hands and knees to throw their hair before them over their heads to dry in the sun.” I cherish this beautiful, magnificent image.
However, it is the forceful end that clinches my admiration and what I relate to now as I have aged. Frost says that sometimes when “life is too much like a pathless wood,” he wishes he could “get away from earth a while and then come back to it again and begin over.” However, he doesn’t want “to have his wish half granted and not return” because “earth’s the right place for love. I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.” Despite the boy’s flirtation with death, he prefers accepting life in all its lights and darks, what we all experience if we live each day fully.
