Carol Frost
May 1999

Carol Frost is the author of two chapbooks and six full length collections of poems, including Liar's Dice (1978), Day of the Body (1986), Chimera (1990), and most recently Pure (1994) and Venus and Don Juan (1996), both published by TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press. A volume of her new and selected poems (Love and Scorn) is due out from TriQuarterly Books in the spring of 2000. The National Endowment for the Arts has awarded her two fellowships, and her writing has been honored by PEN, the Pushcart Prize committee (eleven nominations, two honorable mentions, two prizes), the Elliston and the Poets’ Prize committees, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner. Her essays and poems appear in such journals as The Atlantic Monthly, American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, Southern Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, and the New York Times. She founded and directs the Catskill Poetry Workshop at Hartwick College, where she is writer-in-residence. She has also taught at Syracuse University, for the Warren Wilson MFA Program, Wichita State University (as Distinguished Poet, in the spring of 1998), Washington University, where she was visiting writer fall, 1998, the Vermont Studio Center, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Sewanee Writers' Conference, the Five Islands Press Workshop at the University of Wollongong in Australia, and numerous other workshops and universities. She lives in upstate New York with her husband, the poet Richard Frost. They have two sons.

Frost calls her new work "a departure from my eleven line poems. What I was trying to write began to feel a little too familiar. I could still play with the shape, creating the room—in each poem a different sort of room—for the dramatic process to unfold, but I knew a little too well how to work through the various tensions set up in the eleven lines. Larry Levis told me he thought there was a lot of energy left over at the end of some of the shorter poems, and I wanted to see where that energy, if it was there, could take me and whether in a longer poem, with its greater variety of dramatic forces and dissonance, I'd know how to create and sustain a newer (for me newer) equilibrium." Frost's only other comment was to the question of whether her poems were autobiographical:

"Isn't all poetry autobiographical? I mean in its revelations of the motions a mind makes? The hesitancies, detours, innuendoes, spirals of lies and truths as a person remembers or invents are as essentially personal as the facts of that person’s life. If readers look for event first and take for granted the manner of telling, even so the textures, the distribution of the literal and figurative, the timing of a writer's disclosures, false or true, are important in establishing, among other things, the authenticity of the work, authenticity being, with little doubt, more important than autobiography. I know, for instance, many poems that lean too heavily on their subject. The fact of some trouble or trial as asserted in the poem can be documented as having occurred to the writer, but the voicing or stance in the poem is somehow at odds with its gravity—we doubt its authenticity in much the same way we may come to doubt a person's character. The verbal contraption Auden said a poem is can tell us as much about the writer as a chair, in every turn of the lathe and by every peg, tells us about the woodworker, even if our main purpose is to rest there comfortably, considering our own affairs. We may ask, Is it made of burlwood or tiger maple? What rough brushstrokes, or fine, applied the patina of lacquer or oil? What economy, what sense of design is present? What can be learned, revealed no less in the handiwork than in the expression, is what is essential to and about the artist—the state of awareness or remembrance, feeling, intent, proclivity, reason, care, regard, trifle, judgment and imagination, but not whether the trees grew in her back yard. Do the experiences and the emotions in my poems refer to me? Yes and no. My son nearly did fall off a mountain in Venezuela, like the boy in my poem 'Nothing.' But as far as I remember at the time, I thought nothing. I was too stunned."

Carol Frost's books are available online at Amazon.com (Pure, Venus and Don Juan) or Barnes and Noble (Pure, Venus and Don Juan).

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