So I just got an exasperated email from a friend who asked me, "Does anyone really read poetry?" I'm inferring that by "anyone" she means "anyone who isn't also writing poetry, composing a scholarly treatise about poetry, or doing homework." I'm sorry to say that my answer has to be "hardly a soul." However, I'm hoping that you might have a wider circle of literate acquaintances. If so, do leave a comment so that my friend and I can feel more hopeful. Though if you feel obliged to leave a negative comment, we would at least be able to invite you to become a founding member of our Cozy Iconoclasts Club.

Still, people keep writing poems. And the following paragraphs from Orhan Pamuk's Snow seem, to me, to be a remarkably accurate description of the about-to-write-a-poem sensation. (Novel weather update: it's still snowing, of course. Quotation punctuation update: the ellipses in the passage are the author's, not mine).

What am I doing in this world? Ka asked himself. How miserable these snowflakes look from this perspective, how miserable my life is. A man lives his life, and then he falls apart and soon there is nothing left. Ka felt as if half his soul had just abandoned him but still the other half remained; he still had love in him. Like a snowflake, he would fall as he was meant to fall; he would devote himself to the melancholy course on which he was set. His father had a certain smell after shaving, and now this smell came back to him. He thought of his mother making breakfast, her feet aching inside her slippers on the cold kitchen floor; he had a vision of a hairbrush; he remembered his mother giving him sugary pink syrup when he woke up coughing in the night, he felt the spoon in his mouth, and as he gave his mind over to all the other little things that make up a life and realized how they all added up to a unified whole, he saw a snowflake. . . .

So it was that Ka heard the call from deep inside him: the call he heard only at moments of inspiration, the only sound that could ever make him happy, the sound of his muse. For the first time in four years, a poem was coming to him; although he had yet to hear the words, he knew it was already written; even as it waited in its hiding place, it radiated the power and beauty of destiny.