Travis Naught, Pinsky, Frost, and “The Poet’s Next of Kin in College”

I’d like to introduce my good friend Travis Naught by way of something my good friend Bob Pinsky said when he was in Spokane not long ago. In a Q&A session, someone asked Pinsky what drew him to poetry and in his answer Pinsky spoke of how writing poetry is more about practice and play than it is about study or critical thinking. He referenced an essay by Robert Frost called “The Poet’s Next of Kin in College” where Frost elaborates on the notion of poetry as the development of prowess in form that is more akin to what happens in athletics than it is to what happens in the English, Philosophy, or Social Sciences departments. Here’s a snippet of Frost’s essay:

Poetry is a young thing, as we all know. Most of the poets have struck their notes between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. That is just the time when you are in college and graduate school. It is in those ten years that you will strike your note or never. And it is very like athletic prowess in that respect. They are very close together…. The thing itself is indescribable, but it is felt like athletic form. To have form, feel form in sports — and by analogy feel form in verse. One works and waits for form in both.

[Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose and Plays, Library of America, p. 771.]

So what does this have to do with Travis Naught? Well, consider the fact that Travis pursued grad studies in Sports Psychology and that he worked with the Eastern Washington University basketball program for ten years before he set that aside to pursue poetry more or less full time. Consider further that Travis is limited by Spinal Muscular Atrophy to a body that will never in this life be able to throw a ball or swing a bat — and Frost’s analogy takes on an even greater significance and poignancy.

Here’s a poem from Travis’s extraordinary book, The Virgin Journals which you all should buy a copy of if you haven’t yet. The poem is called “Lack of Physicality” and I think you’ll see how it ties into what Pinsky said about what Frost said and what I just said about Travis:

Lack of Physicality

It does not matter
That my body of work
Is less physical than yours
Because the number of words
Counted on my page
Are counted like

Your number of barbell curls

Each clever rhyme
Adds up like an assist
Bodies collide in a screen
At the top of the key
Rolling down the lane
A give and go style dime

Aiming to win with each shot

Poised for action
Just like you
So take a look at my lines
See their double meaning
Forget everything about
What you thought you knew

(The Virgin Journals, p. 21)

So listen up people. Forget everything you thought you knew about poetry and check out Travis Naught.