The Curse and Blessing of the Frog

What biology teacher hasn't dwelt on frogs?  Slice 'em, dice 'em, pith 'em, flay 'em.  Stick pins in their cute little organs.  Like yon Cassius, I thought too much, and I know I began to look pained.  My students: "Why do we have to cut up a grasshopper?  When are we going to get to the frogs?"  A salesman:  "A bology teacher?  I never took bology, but I always thought it would be fun to bisect an ol' frog."  Me:  "Well..."

Snakes are forever safe from regular appearances in the basic course--every snake organ looks like every other snake organ, long and thin.  But frogs were born with a curse--God made little frog innards too Disneyesque, too damned easy to identify.   And frogs too innocent and innocuous.  I have my own theory about who started this bology/frog thing, but that's another story.

So, I began to say firmly:  Ahem, excuse me, but biology is the science of life.  We will look at live things.  As much as possible.  And we did.  We made Berlese funnels and collected soil critters from the flowerbeds outside the classroom.  I went to the bait shop, and we staged cricket contests, and created pecking orders.  We fed water bugs and looked at swimming behavior.  We dangled bits of carrots on strings in front of living toads to ascertain facts about feeding behavior.  We did something with live white rats.  I can't remember what, but I know we didn't kill them ("sacrifice" is the term), because I brought them home when the school year ended, and they died of old age in a cage in my garage.

While I yearned for the day when plastic models or computer dissection would give me and the frogs a break, there was the year of the frog shortage, when we had to save the "dissected" frogs for next year;  there were the African clawed frogs, touted as substitutes for the standard grass frogs; and there were emerging reports from around the world about frogs in trouble.  

There were also the frogs of literature.   In 1993, I went to a writers' conference in Charleston, and my antennae must have been up for amphibians.  Mary Oliver read a toad poem, and a couple of other poets followed suit, and I came home wondering about the genre in general.  I placed a tiny classified ad in Poets & Writers magazine, asking for poems or short prose about frogs and toads.  As an afterthought, I added "salamanders okay," because salamanders are in the same taxonomic group and I didn't want to slight them.

I don't know what I expected, but certainly not 400-plus responses, from Hawaii to England.  By then we had moved and I was no longer teaching, so I had time to sort through the papers in various ways.  The pieces fell into definite categories.  Warts.  Sound.  Metamorphosis.  Dissection.  The frog prince.  Jumping.  Chance encounters (flowerpot, toilet, etc.).  Rain/Roadkill.  Disappearance.  A few salamanders.  

I put together a manuscript, and began to reply to the contributors.  I tried to represent each category, and to represent a variety of poetic forms.

I wrote an introduction:  "Here...in rhyme and free verse and incisive prose, is a delicious sampling of what contemporary writers are saying about what amphibians have said to them...Here, at the interface of land and water, are human and amphibian serenades, shrill and bass, light and profound, joyous and mournful, tender and angry, gleeful and rappy."  I especially liked the joyous and the gleeful.

Agent Joan Brandt tried without success to find a commercial publisher for the collection.  Publishers didn't know what to make of it.  Well, neither did I.  But I knew it was important.  It was a paean to all those frogs who had given up their little organs for the cause of knowledge.  A salute to the Class Amphibia.  An apology to a frog (also the title of one of the poems included). 

Ken Morris created the cover and the "bashful" phrase.  Canadian illustrator Barry Flahey and others provided a few line drawings.  I published it myself.  Some of the contributors are well-known.  For one poet, this was his first publication.  This odd book is now ten years old, and odd things have happened with it.  Some of the poems came to be recited by an amphibian sculpture at the Detroit Zoo.  One has been reprinted in a government publication.  It has been distributed to herpetologists.   The book appears among listings of publications that address science and literature.  

Here is part of a poem by R. P. Lister.  It was first published in Punch, in 1948.

There is great beauty in the bog

Where muddy creatures play,

And I have brought my friend the frog

To point me out the way.