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When you come to the fork in the road, take it. Yogi Berra was right. Well, sort of. If we keep walking, we will be faced with new forks in the road. It may be time to make new choices. We are unlikely to be presented with an opportunity to double back. Commit to your passions. Carry them in your backpack. Dare to take the next step on the ‘road-of-the-I-do-not-know.’ I believe that the expression, If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there is a distortion of the truth. It suggests that living without goals is aimless. I create a life of adventure, discovery and manifestation. I co-create a world where people are safe to bring what they love and what matters into being — by being a compassionate teacher and expressive painter. That is my mission; not a goal. When I chose a path and stay on mission, there is rarely any remorse. SIGH!

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The speaker stands in the woods, considering a fork in the road. Both ways are equally worn and equally overlaid with un-trodden leaves. The speaker chooses one, telling himself that he will take the other another day. Yet he knows it is unlikely that he will have the opportunity to do so. And he admits that someday in the future he will recreate the scene with a slight twist: He will claim that he took the less-traveled road…

…Ironic as it is, this is also a poem infused with the anticipation of remorse. Its title is not “The Road Less Traveled” but “The Road Not Taken.” Even as he makes a choice (a choice he is forced to make if does not want to stand forever in the woods, one for which he has no real guide or definitive basis for decision-making), the speaker knows that he will second-guess himself somewhere down the line—or at the very least he will wonder at what is irrevocably lost: the impossible, unknowable Other Path. But the nature of the decision is such that there is no Right Path—just the chosen path and the other path. What are sighed for ages and ages hence are not so much the wrong decisions as the moments of decision themselves—moments that, one atop the other, mark the passing of a life. This is the more primal strain of remorse.

Thus, to add a further level of irony, the theme of the poem may, after all, be “seize the day.” But a more nuanced carpe diem, if you please.

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Robert Frost (C. 1910)
b. 1874 – d. 1963

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Two roads diverged in the woods, and I

I took the one less traveled by,

and that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost

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The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

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SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on Frost’s Early Poems.” SparkNotes LLC. 2002. http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/frost/ (accessed June 21, 2010).

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Rainer Maria Rilke, 1875-1926

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And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle that tells us we must always trust in the difficult, then now what appears to be the most will become our intimate and trusted experience. Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act,  just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps Everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.
Rainer Maria Rilke

We live in difficult times. We carry a heavy load of anger. We battle with entitlements. We place blame on others. Who firightens you? What frightens you. What actions may you take bring your passions into being, no matter what?

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Augustus Rodin (1840-1917 )

Photograph (C. 1907) by Edward Steichen (1879-1973)

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Rilke was Rodin’s secretary for a while, and Rodin one day advised him to go down to the zoo and try to see something. Rilke did and spent some time watching a panther. Rodin respected seeing, the ability to observe, to use the terrific energy of the eyes, to pay attention to something beside one’s own subjectivity. Rilke understood that his own poetry lacked seeing, and he wrote nearly two hundred poems in about six years in an effort to sharpen his seeing. Through that labor, Rilke pased to a new stage of his art.

News of the Universe, Robert Bly

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The Panther
Rainer Maria Rilke
In the Jardin des Plantes, Paris

From seeing the bars, his seeing is so exhausted
that it no longer holds anything anymore.
To him the world is bars, a hundred thousand
bars, and behind the bars, nothing.

The lithe swinging of that rhythmical easy stride
which circles down to the tiniest hub
is like a dance of energy around a point
in which as great will stand stunned and numb.

Only at times the curtains of the pupil rise
without a sound…then a shape enters,
slips through the tightened silence of the shoulders,
reaches the hear, and dies.

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How are you like the panther? How are you like Rilke? When do you make time to sit still and observe? This afternoon go to the zoo, a park, a beach, a… Then sit and observe. Meditate on it. Breathe in and Breathe out. Listen to your heartbeat. Show courage. Love what you see. If you hear voices in your mind, command them to go away or perhaps it would be interesting to listen without judgements. Do this for at least an hour. When you are finished, write in your journal, draw, photograph, create.Use the energy of your eyes.

Let us hear your comments. Did you do this exercise? Did you discover the essence of what you observed? Did you turn a dragon into a princess?

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Alfred A.Knopf in 1935

b.1892 – d.1984

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Back in the 70′s when I was a Creative Director at Ballantine Books — the paperback division of Random House — I had the privilege to meet some of the most extraordinary men and women in the book pubishing world: Donald Klopher, Robert Bernstein, Ronald Bush, Robert Gottleib, Ian Ballantine, and Alfred Knopf, to name a few. Read Knopf’s bio for the history of publishing in the 20th Century. He was brave, strong, powerful, opinionated, creative, a risk taker and one of the few publishers willing to publish poetry in the so-called mainstream.

After receiving his B.A. in 1912, Knopf worked as a clerk at Doubleday (1912–1913), then as an editorial assistant to Michael Kennerly (1914). He founded his own publishing house in 1915. The company initially emphasized European, especially Russian, literature, hence the choice of the borzoi as a colophon. At that time European literature was largely neglected by American publishers; Knopf published authors such as Joseph Conrad, W. Somerset Maugham, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, André Gide, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, and Franz Kafka.

Knopf also published many American authors, including H.L. Mencken, Theodore Dreiser, Vachel Lindsay, James M. Cain, Conrad Aiken, Dashiell Hammett, James Baldwin, John Updike, Shirley Ann Grau, and Knopf’s own favorite, Willa Cather. He often developed a personal friendship with his authors. Knopf’s personal interest in the fields of history, sociology, and science led to close friendships in the academic community with such noted historians as Richard Hofstadter, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Samuel Eliot Morison.

For more bio info

Honoring Knopf’s passion for publishing poetry, Knopf (a division of Random House) offers a Poem-A-Day each April. Go to Knopf and sign-up for a free daily poem, which often includes recordings of readings, broadsides, biographies, comments, background material, and food for the soul.

How may you use poetry as a point-of-departure? Post your artwork and comments here.

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