Learning about belief

 Robert Frost argued that poetry is central to an education. Thinking is learning to manage metaphors, and that’s best learned by reading poetry, he said.

He also said that the student of poetry will learn about belief. There are several species. Love-belief is belief in someone else. The relationship between lover and beloved is believed into something real.

That line is enlightening to me. A lot of love poetry has a peculiar sense of yearning. The poet wants something to be true or real and is writing as if it were. Regardless of how the poem is written, I tend to hear it in the subjunctive.

Frost’s take on self-belief is fascinating. He says that when a person is young, he knows more about himself than he can prove. His knowledge isn’t accepted by other people, especially adults. The young person believes that self into existence.

I’m not a teacher, but if I were, I’d want to talk about Frost.

• Sources: Frost’s essay “Education by Poetry” is in The Collected Prose of Robert Frost, edited by Mark Richardson; Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard, 2007. The parts of his essay discussed here on are on pp. 109-10.

For an earlier note on this essay, see Frost: ‘Education by Poetry,’ June 5, 2024. It’s here:

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2024/06/frost-education-by-poetry.html

The raid in Georgia

 If you’re trying to make sense of the FBI raid on the Fulton County elections office in Atlanta and the seizure of 2020 ballots, it’s not about the 2020 election. It’s about this year’s midterms and 2028.

The 2020 ballots have been counted three times. Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in Georgia. Everyone in Georgia knows about Trump’s calls to the state’s Republican leaders, ordering them to find the votes to make him the winner. He was rebuffed by the governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general and secretary of state.

However, the State Election Board, which is allied with Trump, is seeking to take over elections in Fulton County, which is overwhelmingly Democratic. Just about everyone here believes the raid was staged to find a pretext for declaring that the Fulton County election office is “underperforming,” so that Trump loyalists can decide which ballots are counted.

An interesting detail: The head of the FBI’s office in Atlanta, Paul W. Brown, apparently left the agency shortly before the raid, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

News of an earlier day

 As a young reporter, I once spent 24 hours in a van with my friend and boss Phil Latham. We were parked at a motel at the busiest crossroads in Lufkin, Texas, a couple hours north of Houston.

Phil had wondered what kinds of things came through town on the tanker trucks that filled up at the refineries and chemical plants on the coast. Many of the trucks headed toward Chicago and the Midwest, meaning they came our way.

How many trucks came through town each day? What were they carrying?

We consulted state agencies. We asked the fire department, which was in charge whenever there was an accident involving a spill. When we asked how many tankers came through town, no one knew.

So Phil and I spent 24 hours in a van, armed with binoculars, reading the tags on the tankers that told emergency crews what they were dealing with. Each tag had a 4-digit code. We tried to stay awake so we could get two sets of eyes on each tag.

Hundreds of tankers came through. As you’d expect, most were carrying gasoline. But a surprising number were carrying industrial chemicals. Some were so specialized and so toxic the fire department was not equipped to deal with them. In a couple of cases, emergency officials hadn’t heard of the chemicals. These extremely hazardous chemicals were passing neighborhoods and schools.

I suppose you could call it a stakeout, although the word conjures up a sense of excitement that was absent. Staying alert for 24 hours involves a lot of coffee, sandwiches and cookies. It warps your sense of time. Toward the end, you’re looking at your watch every 3 minutes, wondering whether a half hour had passed.

It seems to me that our sense of space also can become warped. We imagine that dangers and threats — or just the things that should concern us — are somewhere else, somewhere distant. 

Supply and demand

 The British novelist Lee Child got his education through the public library. Here’s a recollection from his childhood: 

We moved the next year to Birmingham, where the library system let you take two books at once, which was great, except with weekly visits two wasn’t really enough, so I instituted a Chicago voter-fraud system at our house. All visitors were signed up for library tickets. Deceased relatives were encouraged to apply. Soon, I could get six books a week, a pace I have kept up all my life.

 

I like the suggestion that things in limited supply take on great value. And of course he’s right. Two a week is not enough.

• Source: Lee Child, “Lee Child: Books let me escape my dull, grey Sixties childhood”; The Sunday Times, Jan. 17, 2026. It’s here:

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/get-britain-reading/article/lee-child-author-prison-literacy-interview-x6nb88890

Hayden: ‘Ice Storm’

 I read Robert Hayden’s “Ice Storm” in wonder. How much can be said in 62 words.

The poem describes trees — bound in ice, battered, bent and broken — and dissolves into a prayer:

 

The trees themselves, as in winters past,

will survive their burdening,

broken thrive. And am I less to You,

my God, than they?

 

The poem was written in the days when corrupt governments brutalized and intimidated law-abiding citizens who were African American.

The poem was read (by me) during the big ice storm, when a corrupt government was brutalizing and intimidating law-abiding citizens in Minnesota.

A story of pioneers

 One of the minor masterpieces in American literature is a false biography of two early residents of Chase County, Kansas — he and she.

The short piece is not exactly fact or fiction. William Least Heat-Moon assembled it.

Least Heat-Moon was working on what he called a deep map of a county in the middle of the country and found an old marker in Elk Cemetery. He couldn’t make out the name or names. The lack, if that’s what it was, bothered him and eventually disturbed his dreams.

Least Heat-Moon finally got out the four-volume oral history of the county and began to assemble a story — an anecdote here, a detail there — making the two pioneers. He and she settled when the Kansas or Kaw Indians still passed through. The gaps between the logs of the pioneers’ cabin were wide enough to throw a cat through.

 

sometimes the Kaw passed by and stopped to look through the gaps and once to make friends she held a mirror up to a gap and scared tarnation out of a painted brave and then there was a laughter like you wouldn’t believe and they took turns gaping into it and admired and chortled and thereafter when passing always stopping to use the mirror …

 

sometimes the whole night she’d hear the Kaws up on the hill where their dead lay buried wailing and moaning and that was the worst sound on the prairie and one spring she realized she hadn’t heard them that year and she never did again …

 

I love the diction. The gap wide enough to throw a cat through will be recognized as a standard measure by people who grew up among country folks.

I also love the way the story handles the most important news of the era — the disappearance of an entire people from their homeland. It seems to me that most of the important stories are recognized in reflection, rather than in the breathless accounts of the day.

• Source: William Least Heat-Moon, PrairyErth; Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991, pp. 433-38. The quotations are on p. 434 and p. 436.

Glimpses of an ice storm

 What the weatherwoman said: High over the Georgia Piedmont, warm, moist air came up from the Gulf and collided with the cold front coming in from the Rockies. Temperatures on the ground were much lower — around 20 degrees. The water was warm when it started falling but was ice by the time it hit.

What it looked like:

• The trees, coated, were bright.

• Icicles hung from the roofs of the birdfeeders, which were as crowded as a diner. The birds looked as if they were poking their heads through the bars of a jail.

• The canvas cover over the woodpile was once as soft as a blanket. When I fetched firewood, it was like lifting the hood of a car.