Robert Frost’s snowy evening, Robert Louis Stevenson’s summer sun, the rainy day imagined by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, they exist in the pages of poetry books.
These days, you can find poems online as well as in hushed libraries. Who would expect to stumble across the works of beloved poets on a neighborhood walk?
On a tree-lined street in north Everett, walkers out in all sorts of weather can stop to enjoy a stanza or two, thanks to poetry lover Rebecca Frevert.
Last summer, she and her husband, Desmond Skubi, built a poetry kiosk. The hinged wooden book on a post is in their parking strip along Hoyt Avenue. Frevert puts out one poem at a time, sliding each page into a clear plastic cover for rain protection.
Passersby on Thursday could have stopped to read light verse by Odgen Nash. “Isabel met an enormous bear, Isabel, Isabel, didn’t care,” begins the American poet’s “Adventures of Isabel.”
“It’s about an intrepid little girl,” said Frevert, who left the ending off her current selection and instead typed a teaser, “to be continued,” at the bottom of the page.
Frevert, 56, is a nurse and midwife who works at Providence Regional Medical Center Everett. Exhausted Thursday after being up all night with a woman in labor, she said that helping to bring new lives into the world is itself a kind of poetry.
“It’s seeing the beauty, mystery and amazing power of birth,” Frevert said. “It’s just lovely.”
Away from work, the mother of two sons loves gardening as much as she loves reading poetry. In a light-bulb-in-the-brain moment, she decided to bring those two loves together.
“Being in the garden is like being in poetry for me. I got to thinking about that one day,” Frevert said. “How could I encourage poetry in people’s lives, and share it with the community?”
The idea for the kiosk was hatched, and the little stand in front of her book-filled house has now weathered summer, fall and winter.
During December’s snowstorms, bundled up walkers took time to read Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”
“Even on those snowy days, people were out walking like crazy,” she said. “North Everett is such a walking community.”
When the family’s Welsh corgi died last summer, Frevert’s younger son put a poem about the dog in the kiosk. “Flowers showed up, people put them at the bottom of the kiosk,” she said.
Frevert said she and her husband read poetry to their sons, Ben, 20, and Daniel, 17, from the time they were babies. “I always tell my patients to read to their children when they’re little,” she said.
Her love of poetry goes back to childhood, when her mother gave her a collection by Edgar Allan Poe. It was the first book she ever received as a gift, and she still has it.
Today, she carries dozens of poems around in her head. Frevert doesn’t remember having to memorize poems in school, but now she takes poems written on scraps of paper with her when she goes out for walks. She memorizes them, footstep by footstep.
“It’s good for your brain,” she said.
It’s just as likely to be good for your spirit.
“Everybody grows up with poetry, but the word puts people off,” she said. “We all know poetry, even in a Beatles song. Bob Dylan is one of the greatest poets ever.
“It’s just fun,” Frevert said.
Columnist Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlstein@heraldnet.com.
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