• File: Oliver Parini | Courtesy
• Jay Parini | Robert Frost: Sixteen Poems to Learn by Heart, by Robert Frost and Jay Parini, Library of America, 164 pages. $24.

Author and Middlebury College professor Jay Parini, 75, is steeped in the life and work of Robert Frost. Parini spent a quarter century crafting Robert Frost: A Life, his 2000 biography of the iconic American poet (1874-1963). He has taught Frost's poetry for 50 years, first at Dartmouth College and then Middlebury.

So it makes sense that Library of America, a nonprofit publisher of classic American literature, commissioned Parini to create a commemorative collection of Frost's poetry for the poet's 150th birthday. The result is Robert Frost: Sixteen Poems to Learn by Heart. This Friday, March 29, Town Hall Theater and the Vermont Book Shop in Middlebury are cohosting a book launch and birthday party featuring Vermont actors reciting the poems, a Q&A and book signing with Parini, and cake for all.

Frost, a four-time Pulitzer Prize winner, owned five Vermont farms over the years. He moved to the state from New Hampshire in 1920, spent time in the Shaftsbury area and lived for 40 summers in a cabin in Ripton, where he also cofounded the Bread Loaf School of English. He is buried in Old Bennington.

When asked in a recent phone call how he managed to pare down Frost's oeuvre of 250-odd poems to 16 representative ones, Parini said, "It was hell. They wanted me to keep it to 12, and I couldn't bear it."

In the interest of encouraging readers to learn the selections by heart — Frost often delivered them that way in his public readings — Parini chose shorter poems, including the iconic "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" and "The Road Not Taken." The rhymed, nine-line "Fire and Ice" might be the easiest to memorize; more challenging are the blank-verse poems "Birches" and "The Wood-Pile," the latter at 60 lines.

While the poems are relatively short, Parini — a poet himself — provides a thorough introduction to Frost's life and a 2,000-word commentary on each poem, all in engaging, conversational prose. Much of the writing incorporates stories others told him about Frost. Some came from Frost's friends John Sloan Dickey at Dartmouth and Victor E. Reichert at Middlebury, whom Parini befriended later in their lives.

"I've got a treasury of Robert Frost lore in my head," Parini said.

In one memorable case, Parini became part of the lore. In December 2007, 29 teenagers broke into Frost's historic Ripton home to party, leaving behind a mess. For their punishment, which was written up in the New Yorker, the judge sentenced them to take a class on Frost with Parini.

Michole Biancosino, associate professor of theater at Middlebury, is directing eight actors, who will deliver about half the poems at the book launch. The actors include community members, Midd students, Biancosino's colleague Alex Draper, and stage and screen star Jeremy Holm, who has appeared in "House of Cards," "The Americans" and The Ranger.

"When you hear poems performed as little monologues, it really brings out so much more than just reading them off the page," Biancosino said.

In his introduction to the book, Parini recalls Frost's impact on his teenage mind. His ninth-grade teacher in Scranton, Pa., required him to analyze, memorize and recite "Stopping by Woods" to the class. Parini describes "two lines that changed my life: 'The only other sound's the sweep / Of easy wind and downy flake.' Frost frames those lines in a way that carves them into your brain."