Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Robert Frost on chickens


Robert Frost, who lived as a farmer in New Hampshire for much of his adult life, wrote a poem about his favorite chicken. It's "A Blue Ribbon at Amesbury," and is included in my book, the only other place it is reproduced outside the Complete Poems.
When I contacted the estate for permission to reprint the poem, the administrator was unfamiliar with the poem. She told me no one had ever asked for it before. So I feel honored to have brought this poem to a wider audience.

In honoring him on the Writer's Almanac, http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/, Garrison Kiellor writes: "Robert Frost became one of the most famous poets in the United States. He said, 'A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a homesickness or a love-sickness. It is a reaching out toward expression, an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found the word.'"
This photo is from the Robert Frost page at Eastern Illinois University, http://www.eiu.edu/~eng1002/authors/honors/frost/welcome.html.

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