The Optimist

Back in the day, I played a mean game of golf, good enough to win tournaments and club championships and attract local attention. I worked at it, spending countless hours on the practice range, often under the tutelage of the club’s professional. I even worked at the golf course, in the pro shop, and on the golf course, with the maintenance crew. To a large extent, being a proficient golfer comprised my identity, for others as well as for me.

While I was in graduate school, I did not have the time or opportunity to play. For six years I did not touch a golf club. When I was finally able to take up the game again, I found that I had lost it. Flaws had crept into my swing, and, despite incessant analysis, I was unable to recapture my former level of play. In a pattern that unspooled over many years, I’d think I’d discovered the problem, make the change, but found improvement elusive. I devoured books and magazines featuring golf instruction, took lessons, prowled golf websites to watch videos of professionals’ swings—all to no avail. I would have had better luck clicking my heels three times and wishing I were back in the Kansas of competent play.

The strange thing is that, despite my unsullied record of failure to diagnose and correct my swing, every time I stepped on to the first tee I felt I was on the cusp of rejuvenation. I’d think, “This is the day when it will all come together. Today, what was then will become what is now. This is the day my golf game will be reborn.” By the third hole, however, I had mentally checked out, consoling myself with the thought that at least I was getting some good exercise—or, in my more desperate moments, with the slogan I had once seen on the scorecard of a Baptist-owned course: “A closer walk with God,” although, in truth, it felt more like a loitering in Gethsemane. Actually, Mark Twain was more accurate: “Golf is a good walk spoiled.” Still, the next time I played, I stood on the first tee, fully Galahaded, fully expecting on this foray to find the miraculous grail of my glory days.

And strange to say, miracles, at least of the micro variety, do happen. Three springs ago, while on the practice range, I discovered the problem that had plagued and beleaguered me. What I had lost, I found. Instantaneously, I began striking the ball more solidly, dead solid perfect off the sweet spot, launching it straighter and farther and at a higher trajectory than I had in many years. And on that day, the day when my long-expected renaissance had finally arrived, I drove home, put my golf clubs in a basement corner, covered them with a small tarp, and quit playing.

* * *

I have aspirations for myself. I like the pragmatist notion that meaning is use, body and thought in action. I do not seek to be a bystander to my life, irrelevant to myself. I make plans for the future. They carpenter our lives into an ordered unfolding; they hold an arm outstretched, palm upward, to resist the havocking churn and plunge, the mad ricochet, of events. I expect skills once acquired, to stay acquired, over the course of time, at least until they decline, as they necessarily must, with age. Until then, I go on going on.

That day on the practice range, I reclaimed the ability I had lost. It was enough. And so, I left playing golf behind.

* * *

I am excited at the beginning of every semester. I am sure that the work I have done to prepare my classes has refined them to the point of can’t-fail success. Having read up on best practices and the latest pedagogical research into student learning; having created new in-class activities sequenced and scaffolded to impart the skills necessary for student success on papers and tests; feeling certain that this cohort of students will display curiosity, will write clearly and comprehensively in prose polished by editing and proofreading, will be willing to read not just with texts but against and beneath them, will gladly entertain ideas that broaden their horizons rather than genuflect before those that validate and reinforce their preconceptions, will be open to making canyon-wide intellectual leaps that even Evil Knievel would envy, I approach each new class with radiant expectation. “This is the semester it will all come together,” I think; “this is the semester when students will embrace intellectual culture and experience a renaissance of wonder.”

And three weeks in, that radiant expectation has not just been dimmed; it has been dealt an eyeball kick and forehead blow. 4-G attention spanned, smartphone-armed, discipled by the new dispensation testaments of Twitter and Facebook, students will not go gentle into the educational experience I have prepared for them. I realize that the majority of my students might touch an idea, but will not fondle it; that they are good at accessing and disseminating information, but cannot quite massage it into knowledge; that they will resist introspection and refrain from the difficult work of analyzing for assumptions, forecasting implications, and engaging in evaluating and synthesizing ideas. I realize that this semester, like past semesters, will be as frustrating as trying to eat a taco with a fondue fork.

I can feel myself hunkering and find my eyes scanning the surroundings for sandbags to pile up around me. Yet, I think, “OK, I’ll need to rework the architecture of the course once the semester ends.”

* * *

Perhaps I’m ensnared in a Nietzschean eternal recurrence: “the hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again,” he says, and evidently me with it. But I don’t think I love my fate that much, to the point of seeing all my planning haywired and hackysacked. Perhaps I need to renounce my affiliation with Emerson’s “party of hope.” Perhaps I suffer from optimism bias, projecting rosy faith into the future where it solidifies into expectation. Perhaps I pursue a fool’s folly, victimized by self-delusion, an apologist for an unrealistic thithered elsewhere. But whatever it is, it is necessary. Absolutely necessary.

I have aspirations for these young persons, aspirations that may involve me, certainly my children and grandchildren. I want them to know how to coax meaning from information. I want them to be minds in thrumming motion, celebrants of kinetic thought, acolytes of continual learning. I want them to realize that the world is not for loitering in but acting upon; that it is made, not given, and, thus, can be remade. And so, I remake my courses. I simply must believe, must expect, that this time, this time, it will indeed and in fact all come together.

And when it does, when it does, I will leave teaching behind.

Robert Frost: The Golf Poems

It is not generally known that the poet Robert Frost was an avid golfer. Unfortunately, his avidity for the game was not in the least matched by any skill at playing it. On the golf course, Frost exhibited ineptitude’s ineptitude; it was artlessness syncopated by lavish bungling, incompetence sung in the key of clamoring ungainliness, an anvil upon which his equanimity was hammered molecule-thin. Angels wept at the sight. But, as poets are sometimes wont to do, Frost turned his frustration into poetry. It offered catharsis.


Frost secretly compiled his golf poems and hid them away. No one knew of their existence until your Intrepid Researcher (IR), rummaging through uncatalogued boxes stored in the basement of the Lamoni Public Library in southern Iowa discovered them. What follows is one of the poems. Your IR promises that more will, for the first time, see the light of day.


Robert Frost Suffers Depression after a Particularly Bad Round of Golf*


Scores rising and hopes falling fast oh fast,
On a golf course I played this weekend past.
My effort, like my game, is out of bounds.
My game’s a bag of botches first and last.


The trees and ponds have them, they are theirs.
My golf balls are smothered in their lairs.
And just when I think my game’s come around,
A double bogey takes me unawares.


And those double bogeys will be more ere they be less.
How many would be impossible to guess.
My stock and store of curse words are expended;
I can express nothing—there’s nothing to express.


I am not fooled by talk of golf’s graces,
As if it were a promised-land oasis.
No Canaan looms to redeem my doffing game.
I wander lost in its desert places.


*In all of the golf poems, Frost refers to himself in the 3rd person, perhaps an indication of how the implacably woeful state of his golf game caused him to be beside himself.


Golf was Frost’s Gethsemane. He suffered. The game played havoc with his equipoise: it dekiltered, agoged, and thoroughly millstoned him. Frost believed poetry should be like ice sliding across the surface of a hot stove. Golf, for Frost, proved to be poetry’s dark other. Below, your IR provides another poem from the collection he has named Robert Frost: The Golf Poems.


Robert Frost’s Golf Game Acquaints Him with Darkness


I have been one acquainted with golf’s night.
I have walked out on golf courses—and walked back in pain,
I have outwalked ineptitude’s furthest baneful light.


I have searched for my incorrigible shots in vain.
I have been hailed and passed by golfers behind
And dropped my eyes, unable to explain.


I have swung and looked and thought myself blind
Till from another fairway comes a cry
To tell me where my ball is consigned,


And in that telling lies my golf game’s fall,
Its lack of grace and vertiginous fright.
Yet a Coors clock on the backbar wall


Proclaims the time for quitting neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with golf’s night.



Your Intrepid Researcher (IR) here offers a third poem from the manuscript, Robert Frost: The Golf Poems, that he found mausoleumed in the basement of the Lamoni Iowa Public Library. As do so many of the poems in the manuscript, this one depicts Frost’s fraught fetishization of his incompetence at the sport, but your IR notices here a new wrinkle in the floundering and foozled poet’s psychic economy: a dire warning that his plunge into golf’s dark waters may cannonball-splash into apocalyptic consequences. Indeed, beneath the poem lies an almost Ahabian howl of fury at a seemingly malign and universal spiritus mundi that seeks, actively, to stupefy and degrade all human striving. Overheated verse by and underperforming golfer? Your IR will let you be the judge.


Robert Frost Goes Apocalyptic


My curse words rose with a dinning shout.
One chasing another going out.
I thought of doing something to the course
That sickles do to thickest gorse.
Clouds hung dark and low in the skies,
And echoed my profanities in stark reprise.
You could not tell, it seemed as if
My purpose here was to stage each whiff,
Whiff followed by whiff, and more besides.
It looked as if my inept bona fides
Were on display, not only for the day, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There will be more than my driver broken,
Before my I’m calling it quits was spoken.



Your Intrepid Researcher (IR) discerns a “change of mood” in this fourth selection from Robert Frost: The Golf Poems, a change that, in a small way, saves some part of a day he’d rued. Frost faces a small crisis: his only golf ball has right-angle sliced into the woods. But these woods, while “dark and deep,” are not “lovely.” He decides to avoid the pain of entering the darkness that would confirm his frightening lack of golfing ability.


Your IR speculates that, introspectively speaking, golf, for Frost, was a contact sport where wrath and woe encountered each other and established ongoing, contentious relations. Your IR further speculates (your IR is a voluptuous speculator) that Frost yearned for the blessing of being Ben Hoganed, but that yearning was perpetually mocked until Frost saw himself as a symbol of thwarted effort, a mere effect of what he was unable to master, a being hackysacked by the jeer of fate and frustrated desire. Such a psychic economy creates a mental debt obligation that cannot be collateralized, and, rather than suffer an unswappable credit default, he chooses discretion and withdraws.


Robert Frost Refuses to Stray from the Fairway


As I came to the edge of the woods,
I heard an ominous mumble—hark!
Now if it was dusk outside,
Inside it was dark.


Too dark to pilgrimage or forage
For my errant drive.
Yet it was my last golf ball,
Entombed in that tree-trunked hive.


The woods seemed to gather its breath
As if to muster a voice
Of challenge: I am dark, I am dark.
And it awaited my choice.


Deep in the pillared dark
My golf ball went.
I could, like it,
Go into the dark, and lament.


But no: I was not out for pain.
The fairway is dark enough.
I would not go in for the ball,
And reconfirm my duff.



In this fifth poem from Robert Frost: The Golf Poems, your Intrepid Researcher (IR) discerns a pygmied scintilla of self-acceptance, maybe, even, a peeweed soupҫon of the beginning of the start of the birth of the onset of the inception of wisdom. Perhaps, though, your IR suffers from the pathetic fallacy or intentional fallacy or some other grievous offense against the law of New Criticism which, despite numerous attempts by moderns “to stab it with their steely knives,” it seems “they just can’t kill the beast.” Your IR himself once played golf; he himself fell victim to the immaculate deception that, with enough expended effort, the game could be mastered; he himself experienced the lamentation wrung from a sorrow-drenched heart. But, unlike your IR, who renounced the game, Frost, in his last stanza, suggests he will persist, that, despite being continually Sahara-ed by bunkers, he has found the inner strength to endure even the repetitive slings of golf’s most outrageous arrows.


Because your IR has attention-diverting matters he must deal with, this poem will be the penultimate in the series. However, he assures you that the final poem will offer a trippy surprise.


Robert Frost Bunkered But Not Bunkered


I have been treading in sand all day until I am bunker-tired.
Millions of grains I have trodden on, and I have felt mired.
Perhaps I have been too fierce with fear of out of bounds.
I have trod upon sand I trod in previous rounds.


All summer long traps have invited me in,
And urged me to mistake and flaw, and sin.
All summer long I heard them threaten under their breath,
And when I entered them it seemed with a will to death.


They spoke to my granulated heart as if it were grain to grain.
They filled my shoes and eyes and touched me with the mark of Cain.
But it was no reason for exile to the land of Nod, east of Eden.
I would be up to my ankles in sand the following season.



Your Intrepid Researcher (IR) was stunned, simply and stupefyingly stunned, to find in the uncatalogued box of Robert Frost’s heretofore unknown golf poems a poem written by Wallace Stevens about the pitiable state of Frost’s golf game. Your IR speculates that Frost and Stevens played together, and that Stevens’ taken abackness at Frost’s unlovely swing--a sight that might, just might, launch a single tattered and leaky dinghy, a motion so spasmodically crooked as to defy even the most sedulous of orthopedic straightening efforts, a spectacle so frightening it would most probably have kept Humpty Dumpty firmly seated on the wall, an action so abjectly frenzied as to be incapable of streamlining or safety-checking—moved him to poetic empathy.


But, unlike, say, the rhetorical bluster of politicians or the number of films in which Samuel L. Jackson appears, Stevens’ empathy is not inexhaustible. He proposes interventions, and, if they fail to have the desired effect, well, he is prepared to abandon Frost to the “ambiguous undulations” of his artless golfing efforts. “Pears are not seen/As the observer wills,” Stevens noted. Golf swings either.


The Emperor of the Golf Swing


Call the corrector of golf swings,
The famous one, and bid him whip
Bob’s s crooked stroke into concupiscent flow.
Let the foursomes dawdle and palaver
As they are used to do, and let young men
Boast their rounds in the clubhouse bar.
Let Bob’s summer be more than a finale of spring.
The only emperor is the emperor of the golf swing.


Take from the pages of Golf Digest
All the instructional articles, those sheets
On which slices and shanks find their cure,
And spread them in front of Bob’s face.
If his elbow still protrudes and he yet reverse pivots
It shows how incorrigible he is, and dumb.
Let inept then affix its venomous sting
And frustrate all help from the emperor of the golf swing.