[Roger Slater]

I didn't know who Larry was, but I guess that's okay. Still, that this Larry guy, whoever he was, got a face filled with Robert Frost's shit? That left me wondering what you could possibly mean. I don't know much about Frost, but I don't think of him as someone who would throw shit on someone's face, and I don't know of any familiar expression that would figurativey supplant the literal meaning. Maybe I need to read a biography or two.

[R. S. Gwynn]

Roger, I originally had smut, but that wasn't right. Spit was too ugly. Shit is verbal as well as fecal, "talking shit." See my note about Larry.

WT Clark, man vs. physics is irrelevant to poetic thought? It's also the only game where the lowest score wins. Surely there are metaphors there.

John Riley, I'm working on one about Stevens nailing a palm tree in Key West. More later.

I have no proof but suspect Ben Jonson was the first poet-golfer.

[Roger Slater]

Originally Posted by R. S. Gwynn

I have no proof but suspect Ben Jonson was the first poet-golfer.

Possibly, but apparently the first mention of golf in a poem came a year after Ben Jonson died. It was by an unknown poet. Fifty years later, there's a golf poem by Thomas Kincaid. Here's my source.

[John Riley]

How about Stevens walking down a street in jammed up Key West, old and heavy on his last trip, looking and saying “There’s no damn order here! WTF was I talking about?”

[R. S. Gwynn]

Roger & John: birdies.

[Jim Moonan]

.
What we don't know about Shakespeare would fill volumes. Same goes for Frost and the rest of us.

I can't see any reason to trap Frost in his flaws other than to practice the skeptical religion of Iconoclasm. His answer to us all is written on his tombstone: "I had a lover's quarrel with the world."

Besides the four Pulitzers and the chronically indecisive conundrum of a poem that is "The Road Not Taken" that is a blueprint for the human psyche, what else has he done? "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" for starters. And on and on.

Sam, I wish the rest of the poem packed the same sardonic punch that the first few lines produce. The rest is squandered on tidbits and allusions, so the poem falls short for me. The poem is written to tickle literary historians and academics, not for me.

.

[R. Nemo Hill]

Even adolescent masturbation seems a class-act compared to this.

Nemo

[Simon Hunt]

Interesting how this one seems to divide opinion so much. Some find it clever and rollicking. Others are genuinely OFFENDED by it. I can't really find my way to either of those positions. It's cute but no more for me. Of course, I'm not in the correct part of the ven diagram where Frost fans and golfers converge... It's ok for some poems to have small audiences or to create small satisfactions, but this one is meh for me. Maybe part of that is that I don't speak enough golf to readily understand the last line

[R. S. Gwynn]

Baseball seems the sport of choice for poets, re. Donald Hall, Marianne Moore, and others. There are a few football poems, a few about boxing, which is about as close to Homeric as we can get. The main feeling I get from poets is a disdain for sports. In our age of super-professionalism I guess I can understand this; still, there may be a poem about pickleball about to be written.

[Simon Hunt]

There're some good cricket poems, too, just saying. And fishing ones. Interesting to think about why some sports have been more "poetic" than others