An IQ of One, when confronted with Robert Frost

"A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It finds the thought and the thought finds the words."
-- Robert Frost

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Robyn, a regular reader of This Side of Paradise, sent me the following blurb about one of the truck drivers she encounters at work. Please note that there's no generalization of truck drivers intended here. You may recall from an earlier posting about my coffeehouse days that a truck driver regular named "Buzz" lent me original Leonard Cohen novels. Buzz really knew his coffee, and his literature.

Robyn writes us, "Not sure if you knew this, but I work at a scale house in a sand and gravel pit. So, I weigh the trucks and give them their tickets. Truck drivers are an interesting lot. We have one who tells us he has a higher IQ than all of us combined. Needless to say, he's an idiot. Yesterday, I told him the story of when my oldest son memorized and recited 'The Road Not Taken' by Robert Frost to me for Mother's Day. The truck driver was not familiar with the poem, so I pulled it up online and he read it. He then proceeded to say Frost was not a good poet because the rhythm was wrong. I quickly put him on ignore."

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"Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words."
-- Robert Frost

Begin tangent: There will be idiots in all walks of life who would dismiss anything they hadn't thought of first. And you can like or dislike Robert Frost (we happen to like him here). That's fine.

What we know is -- we don't know everything, or even enough to immediately dismiss anything. We are constantly learning. We have no idea what our IQ is. We want to be dazzled by the words and images. We want to be moved by the music. We never want to shrug off anything or anybody (and sometimes, we daresay that we do, inadvertently perhaps, but it's a fault and we'll work on that). We want to delight in the world like an innocent, and laugh at the simple things, but never at simple people. And also sometimes, we're guessing, we do act like idiots, but we hope we don't act like idiots at the expense of others, for our own (collective) ego.

There are lessons to be learned everywhere, and in everything. There are surprises in everything, too.

"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader."
-- Robert Frost

End tangent.

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You can check out Robyn's blog at: http://robynsart.blogspot.com/. She promises more entries soon. And scroll down the left column for a piece of her artwork -- "Breathe." Thanks, Robyn! -- Geoff & Eleanor