1. Alas, my recent book proposal for a stunning new work of poetry (you can read all about it here) received one lonely publication offer. Unfortunately said publisher seems to have never actually, you know, published a book, so I was reluctant to sign away the publication rights. (By the way, the foregoing is entirely true.)
2. But Fear Not. Being rejected in this manner has not hindered me from reading poetry which other people have convinced the Murky Powers of the Publishing World to put into Print. Robert Frost (you may of heard of him) managed to get lots of his books of poetry published. And, even though he is a rival poet, I must admit he is pretty good. Well, OK he is great. And yes, truth be told, Robert Frost is a better poet than I am. There, I said it.
3. Richard Brookhiser recently wrote a column in which he noted: “One of the benefits of a bad education is the constant pleasure of discovery.” I feel that way about Frost. Over the summer, I spent some time with The Witness Tree. It’s late Frost, and it’s really good.
4. On the other hand, I also read Frost’s A Masque of Reason a few times this summer. I cannot figure out the point of that work. It’s an extended poem—or perhaps it should be called a really, really short play. It purports to be the 43rd chapter of Job (your edition of Job only has 42 chapters). And after reading it several times I cannot figure out why Frost wrote it. It’s just there, neither good nor awful. Yes, it’s a better poem that most of humanity could write, but it is nowhere near as good as Frost at his best. There are a few decent lines here and there, but overall, it’s nothing terribly special. It raises no questions which aren’t in the canonical 42 chapters of Job. And it certainly has no particular insight into the Book of Job. It’s supposed to be funny, but it really isn't all that funny. Anyway, feel free to skip it.
5. The Wikipedia entry for A Masque of Reason is wrong, by the way. It is a very short article, and says “his [Job’s] wife comes along, and tells God about her punishment when she was accused for witchcraft. God says that he is sorry for her and the reason he didn’t do anything about it was because ‘I didn’t have it down in my book’.” Not only did that not happen, but God didn’t actually say the thing put into quotations. This gets me wondering—why would someone bother to write a Wikipedia entry for a poem which said person obviously didn’t read carefully and provide a quotation from the poem which isn’t actually in the poem. Even odder, the thing God actually did say in the poem which resembles the fake quotation is much better (“That is not/Of record in my Note Book.” It’s the Note Book that gives the line all its charm).
6. I look forward to seeing how long it takes for the Wikipedia entry to change in the wake of the last paragraph.
7. All of this gets me wondering about the people who make Wikipedia work. Someone has to write all that text. What type of person is it? I’ve never seen an article on the nature of the Wikipedia writers, but I’ll bet there is an interesting study on it. (Not an anecdotal study about three people who write Wikipedia entries (that would be boring); I mean a real study which looks at what we can figure out about the broad mass of people who write Wikipedia entries in their free time.)
8. Items 6 and 7 combined make an interesting experiment: Is the type of person who would fix an error on Wikipedia the type of person who would actually read this blog post? I have a hypothesis, but I can’t say what it is without corrupting the experiment.
9. Yes, Dear Reader. Item 8 does mean that you are now a part of my Experiment.
10. I started this post thinking I would write about the poems in A Witness Tree. Now I am conducting experiments on human subjects without getting proper approval from the Powers That Be, so I am violating all sorts of protocols. Don’t tell anyone, OK?
Remember, Dear Poet, you are also part of my experiment -Noah
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