June Column

First published in The Evening Sun on Sunday, June 27, 2010:

“Good fences make good neighbors.” Robert Frost ended his famous poem, “The Mending Wall,” with that line. Though I have listened to many professors and poets argue about Frost’s sentiment in “The Mending Wall,” one thing is clear: Frost intends to highlight the tensions present on either side of any fence.

Fences always bring tension with them because just as fences keep things in, they also keep things out. One cannot deny the tension in this famous dialectic. If you need an illustration, just drive down the road, and look at all the gardens in the area with fences around them. In this case, the goal is not to keep the plants in, but to keep the rabbits and groundhogs out. Hence, the fence is a concrete representation of the tension between the animals and the farmer’s dinner, or the predator and the prey.

Another example of the tension fences create is the cliché “the grass is always greener on the other side.” Without the fence, sides would not exist, and everyone would be able to reach the better grass easily, relieving that tension.

When people build fences, they often have a goal in mind, in some cases containment. For instance, sometimes people with dogs will build a fence around the yard so the dog can go outside and run, but not run away. However, even though the fence can keep the dogs inside, it cannot always keep everything out. Local poet Gary Ciocco explores the tension his fence creates between his fenced-in beagles and the squirrels that he cannot contain in his poem “Good Fences Make Fine Beasts”:


Good Fences Make Fine Beasts


It’s a nice gesture
on a Sunday morning
to warn the squirrels
even though
they seem able to avoid
the beagles naturally.
The wild thrill of the hunt
in one of the least-contoured backyards
of an anal-retentive development.
I vow to cut the grass less
and brush the dogs more
as my contribution
to civility.
Either the artist or
the animal in me
makes me want
to frame this game.
And I have no retort
when a squirrel
knocks my Coke
off the fence post
in retaliation.
He’s just a squirrel
after all, and he and I
are ecstatic to be alive,
kicking and gesturing
in the mainly tame
weekend breeze.

In this poem, the fence takes on a bit of a different role than in Frost’s poem. It is meant to contain the beagles; yet, fences like his cannot keep animals like squirrels out. So, this fence creates a bias. It allows the squirrels to cross back and forth, but if the dog comes after them, the fence allows them to escape. About the poem, Ciocco said, “I relish my backyard being a frame for wildness and for all these tensions—including the ironic fact that I required a fence in order to make it wilder.”

When I asked Ciocco about being compelled to save the squirrels, he said, “The stories are real. I have 2 beagles, and in 2007 had a fence put in. Squirrels are everywhere, and my dogs are relentless chasers of them, so I do sometimes try to tap the window hard or otherwise ‘warn the squirrels.’” As the dogs hunt the squirrels, he is torn between his loyalty to his pets and his reverence for the squirrels’ lives, creating yet another tension in his poem. He writes, “It’s a nice gesture / on a Sunday morning / to warn the squirrels.” Thus, when he feels the tension of the hunt, he feels compelled to save the squirrels from impending attacks.

After all this discussion of fences and the tensions they create, my challenge to you for this month is to create your own poem modeled after Frost’s and Ciocco’s. Write a poem in which a fence creates some form of tension for you, animals, plants, or whatever you wish, and post it on my blog: http://poetlaureatehanover.blogspot.com.

Sometimes poems begin in the most practical moments. If you need some inspiration to get started, here is how Ciocco began writing his poem: “This poem actually was written last fall, right after I had a rain garden put in my back yard. My landscapers, Nickie and Ed James, actually told me the story of the squirrel knocking their Coke off a fence post while they were working in my yard, and I appropriated it to myself for concise poetic movement.”