Theron Aiken

16January2005

The Aim Was Song

Interstate 70 stretched endlessly westward over flat, non-descript, Ohio farm land until at last I turned south at Cincinnati and headed into Kentucky. Immediately, the road began to climb up mountains alternately wooded and rocky. Up there a heavy mist hung over the mountains wrapping them in a shroud of mystery, timelessness, and beauty. Then the highway plunged out of the mist and began to descend onto the blue grass plains and ultimately drifted into Tennessee and the music capitol of the world—Nashville.

I had traveled to Nashville to make a presentation to the annual national conference of the National Council of Teachers of English. I had set a number of Robert Frost poems to music and recorded a CD (“The Aim Was Song”) of the songs, and after sending a proposal to the NCTE, I was invited to present at the convention. I was here to talk to an audience of English teachers about Robert Frost’s poetry, to sing some of the songs, and perhaps to sell a few CD’s. While my purpose was in my mind fairly pragmatic, I would discover that I had learned some important lessons about Robert Frost, my profession, and myself.

The Opry Land Hotel, where the convention was held, was several football fields in size, all under glass. A river ran through it with boats full of tourists plying along the water. Plush vegetation abounded with waterfalls cascading down stone mountain sides into the meandering river. Yet, cut out of the trees and greenery and along the river banks, restaurants and bars teemed with people. As I wandered through the greenery, along stone paths that wound through the giant atrium, I felt very alone in the hotel’s immenseness and even more nervous about the presentation I was going to give tomorrow.

I got to the room where I was to present early next morning to set up an amplifier for the guitar and a microphone for myself. At that point I began to wonder about trying to relate to an audience of 350; though I had played before small groups before, I worried that some of the intimacy of Frost’s poetry might be lost in such a large group. But then I realized that this audience all loved poetry and music, and they were all teachers who were looking for ways to make poetry more accessible to their students. I decided to relax and let Frost do the relating for me.

As I talked to the audience about Frost’s life as a poet and what I felt was the musicality of his poetry, I interspersed the talk with poems from different periods of his life which I played and sang for them. The presentation ran about an hour and a half and went extremely well, but the question and answer period went even better. I came to realize the mutual love for Frost’s poetry that these people had by their questions which were aimed at understanding and appreciating the poetry better. Questions like, “Your song of ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ was light and up-beat; does that mean you don’t think that death is a dominant image in the poem?” made me realize that they had caught the mood of the song and were rethinking the meaning of the poem, and that, of course, was the purpose of the CD. Questions like, “Do you have plans to do more poems?” suggested to me that there were more poems by Frost that they loved and wanted to explore. Most of all, the convention presentation turned my sense of isolation into a feeling of camaraderie and mutual interest in poetry and song with many colleagues from across the country. While this was reward enough, selling several hundred of my CD’s after the presentation made the trip even more worthwhile.

Of course there are many events in one’s life that have a significant impact on his outlook, but this was one that influenced me in very dramatic yet subtle ways. I continue to present Robert Frost to various groups, yet that day in Nashville will always be one of my favorite times and one in which I learned much about myself and what I do for a living—teach.