Living Memorial

I choose to be a plain New Hampshire farmer

With an income in cash of say a thousand

(From say a publisher in New York City).

Robert Frost spent only five years (1915-20) in a plain white farmhouse in the sleepy mountain town of Franconia, N.H., before moving on to Vermont. Nonetheless, townspeople decided to buy the house for $55,000 as a Bicentennial project and lend it rent free to a young poet for the summer, with $ 1,000 thrown in for groceries. The choice of the poet was left to the editors of the Atlantic Monthly, which published many of Frost's poems.

Last week Brooklyn Native Katha Pollitt, 27, headed north to take up residence in the house, with two cats, a well-thumbed book of Frost's poetry and a bicycle to get around town. She too has published poems in the Atlantic --mostly free verse, of which Frost disapproved. Sample lines: "You too amaze me, houses of Brooklyn./ All day you are meek, you cup/ unhappiness like water/ when all you want is to be nothing but windows/ to take off into the sky like a flock of birds."

The idea of a living memorial opens unlimited vistas to monument-minded Americans. What about installing a young novelist in William Faulkner's house in Oxford, Miss.? A young architect in Frank Lloyd Wright's house in Oak Park, Ill.? A young physicist in Albert Einstein's house in Princeton, N.J.? A young semanticist in Casey Stengel's house in Glendale, Calif?

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