Monday, November 24, 2008

Robert Frost Project


--Some background:  my research has focused on Robert Frost, particularly on his life and work in Vermont, but also his poetry, which I didn't know a lot about beyond the classic poems.  Have become interested in how he observed and recorded the natural world, and used those observations as metaphors in poetry.  Metaphors about the human condition. 
--Parallels with my work, though very different.  I am interested in metaphor, and how our vision of nature is fabricated.  I use "nature" in my work, but first it has to be filtered through art.  That is why I have a hard time using photographs as source material and instead rely on paintings, drawings.
--My interest in Robert Frost is also about his story.  I am tracing his biography (he lived a couple miles from my house in Shaftsbury) and the story continues to the present:  His house in Ripton, near Middlebury, where he spent summers between 1939 and his death in 1963, was vandalized last winter by partying teenagers.  As part of their sentence took seminars with Middlebury professor Jay Parini, about the work of Frost.  "The Road Not Taken".

2 comments:

Clair said...

Colin --
Welcome to the AOA blogger crowd!

And, if you haven't already run across this book, it might interest you a lot:

Abandoned New England by Priscilla Paton is a very well written and thoughtful book that considers the work of a small group of artists that includes Hopper, Wyeth, Homer, Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Frost. It was the second "AOA book" I read and it ended up leading me down some very interesting paths via its bibliography.

(I've also added your blog link to mine, as we are all doing with each other's blogs.)

Mariella Bisson said...

HI COLIN, I WAS BORN IN AHOUSE THAT ROBERT FROST OWNED ON SHADOW LAKE IN CONCORD. MY MOTHER WAS HEAD OF ENGLISH DEPT AT LYNDON STATE AND SHE KEPT HIS FRAMED AUTOGRAPH OVER HER DESK. ONCE SHE ADMITTED IT WAS FROM A LETTER ASKING WHERE'S THE RENT?????
BEST OF LUCK WITH BLOG-- IT'S NOT TOO HARD TO DO REALLY. AND WOULD YOU KINDLY FILL OUT MY SURVEY TOO?