Monday, June 9, 2008

Jay Parini, Robert Frost, and 25 teenagers...

Jay Parini, biographer of Robert Frost and author of Why Poetry Matters (2008) was asked to administer the sentence of poetry as punishment to 25 teenagers who vandalized Robert Frost's property in December 2007. He said he used Frost's essay "Education by Poetry."

See: "The Best Way Out Is Through," editorial published in The New York Times, June 8, 2008.

p.s. (June 29, 2008):  Based on the above, I ordered the book, and after a quick skim of Why Poetry Matters, I find no mention of Geoffrey Hill.  Does this mean that Hill does not matter to Parini? Probably not, since he's been tagged in his "Poetry Hut Blog" (latest entry tagged, a link to William Logan's Review of A Treatise of Civil Power, blog entry from January 20, 2008), though my guess is that in this book which boasts it uses no jargon, Heaney seems more user-friendly. Why is it that Hill's closeness to the people and to popular culture always seems to be ignored?

Parini reviewed Robert Lowell: Collected Poems for the Guardian (August 9, 2003).
http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/poetry/0,6121,1014876,00.html

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