Edition Announcement #125 - Juliane Eirich

It's officially the last day of the new year, even though I'm still awake the night before. (That totally makes sense, think about it for a second.) I'm getting a jump on the day since I have a very busy morning tomorrow. Isn't that completely absurd? It's a good thing that I love what I do, so I really don't mind doing it all the time.

Bus by photographer Juliane Eirich got me on the hunt for snowy poetry, which there happens to be an abundance of. I rejected Billy Collins — too twee for me! I know people adore him but, as Cicero said, Suum cuique pulchrum est. All the poems about death and dying were ruled right out because why end the year on a bummer note, you know? (Sadly this ruled out all the poems by women that I'd come across.) Frost's Dust of Snow was a real contender for a minute, but lost out in an elimination round against his uber-classic Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.

Path by Pierre Reverdy and Mark Strand's Lines for Winter are fabulous, but neither were enough to unseat Frost. Ultimately, however — in spite of a vigorous campaign by Sara Distin, who memorized the poem as a wee lass — Woods eventually lost out to... The Snow Man by the venerable Wallace Stevens. (I'm a modernist at heart, you see.)

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
and, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

- Wallace Stevens (1921)

Now, having provided you with plenty of poetry to ponder, I wish you all the happiest of New Years and bid you farewell till 2009!

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