Frost Medal Lectures

My first thought, when got the shocking and delightful news of my receiving the Frost Medal, was to wonder if someone had gotten their Marilyns mixed up. They must mean Marilyn Hacker, I thought: she really deserves it. As the news sank in I thought of other poets equally deserving. Then I thought about how my mother would say this puts me together with Tracy K. Smith, Nikky Finney, Terrance Hayes, Natasha Trethewey, Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Dwayne Betts, and Wanda Coleman as evincing a new force in African American poetry. It was only after I'd read the list of Frost Medalists on the Poetry Society's website that I felt the humbling honor of having being granted such recognition during my lifetime. 

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Maxine Kumin writes, "And long before that, when I was an undergraduate at Radcliffe in the 40s, I had the great good fortune to hear Frost read on two occasions to overflow crowds in Sever Hall, one of Harvard's largest classrooms. Students wedged themselves into the window wells and stood along the sides and back of the room as the wise old trouper indulged everyone by reciting his crowd-pleasing favorites: 'Stopping by Woods,' 'Acquainted with the Night,' 'Provide, Provide,' and 'Birches.'"

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Introduced by Mary Gordon, Marie Ponsot's starts her Frost Lecture with the provocative statement: "We begin making poems as babbling infants, and that's a first reason to claim poetry as primitive. Inspired and perhaps hard-wired, infants babble. Poetry begins as babble."

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Introduced by Edward Hirsch, Richard Howard's Frost  Lecture explores Robert Frost as a teacher.

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Anthony Hecht's lecture on the poetry of Robert Frost, focusing in particular on the poem "The Wood Pile".

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Barbara Guest writes, "When I was a young poet, I was immensely influenced, as you know, by painters with whom I circulated. Their ideas of painting took up my young life. I envied their freedom. I began to use some of their methods. Often titles arrived after the poem was finished, as O'Hara illustrates so humorously in his poem, 'Sardines.'"

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