'A Poet's Hope'

Erica Light is the daughter of my late friend Helen Pinkerton (1927-2017), the poet and Melville scholar. We exchange emails several times each year, usually devoted to what we are reading. This week she reported reading some of the writers and books I’ve mentioned recently at Anecdotal Evidence – Maurice Baring, Chekhov, Joseph Epstein. She was interested enough in a poet I wrote about on March 21, James Hayford (1913-93), to request his collected poems, Star in the Shed Window, 1933-88 (New England Press, 1989), through interlibrary loan. “Hayford’s title poem grabbed me,” Erica writes, “because I so often have looked out a certain window on a summer night and seen the constellation Orion out there in the ‘universal deep.’” Here is that poem, written in 1936: 

“Coming into the shed without a light,

I saw the window blue with the outside night,

And in an upper pane a star to keep

My silhouetted sawhorse and my ax:

Observatories in the merest shacks

Open upon the universal deep.”

 

Erica says: “Hayford’s book came in perfect, unread condition (w/o dust jacket); the crisp date due slip stamped only with the date I had requested to borrow it, ‘MAR 21 2024.’. Wonder if I am the first to do so.” That seems likely. Hayford was a protégé of Robert Frost, and their sort of meditative, well-crafted poetry is certainly out of favor. A perfunctory search online turned up more bits of information about Hayford, including a site at Amherst College. There I found this poem:

 

“A poet’s hope: to be,

like some valley cheese,

local, but prized elsewhere.”

 

Now, like Erica, I’ve ordered Star in the Shed Window through interlibrary loan.