Franklin Westcott Robinson, art museum director, art historian, and poet. He used Franklin W. Robinson for his early scholarly works and used Frank Robinson for his creative writing. 

This website is a collection of poetry by Frank Robinson written over the years when he was a teen, a graduate student, a professor, a museum director, and a retiree.

The arrangement of the poems is based on the publication date, which is not necessarily the written date. Robinson’s poems can roughly be divided in three stages: the early stage, which is in Family Poems (1972) and in First Impressions (1973); this is the poems he wrote when he was a teenager and mostly when he was in graduate school at Harvard.

 

The second stage is his haiku, written mostly in Ithaca. During this time, he printed collected haiku almost annually from 1995 to 2019, then sent them out to friends in wintertime as seasonal greetings. The 2001 publication, Window Boxes Full of Snow, is haiku from 1993-2001; the 2008 publication Two Old Dogs Going for a Walk, is haiku from 2002-2008; and the 2011 publication is Soft Applause for the Day. And seventeen annual publications were without a distinct title.

 

The third stage is haiku he has written and is still writing at Kendal, his retirement home since 2015. These works are in Zephyr, an arts and letters magazine published by Kendal’s residents. The 2017, 2018 and 2019 publications all begin with the title Senior Moments. Therefore, we call this period "Senior Moments and Beyond." We will add to this site the poems he will continue to write in the coming years at Kendal.

We use the covers of Robinson’s poems and haiku as the index to the text; and as mentioned previously, these icons are arranged by the chronological order of the publication dates, except for the last one, Zephyr, which is a periodical published annually.

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Teresa K. Mei
Christmas, 2022