Well, we got another foot of snow last night. That makes a total of three feet so far this week. Although Paul has had only a day and half of school this week, he supposedly does have a track meet this afternoon; and if the Plow Guy doesn't appear promptly, Tom will be reenacting a Toyota truck commercial in our driveway.

I finished an editorial project on Friday, so next week I'll have a few days to call my own. I think I'll spend some of that time rethinking the order of my newest poetry and essay manuscripts. I think I'll also spend some of that time listening to music. I think a wash of sound may help me solve some of my manuscript questions, especially as regards the poetry collection.

Lately, among many other books, I've been reading the Aeneid. Poems like this make me ask why I even bother to try to read new poetry . . . let alone write it.

                                                                     First,
the sky and the earth and the flowing fields of the sea,
the shining orb of the moon and the Titan sun, the stars:
an inner spirit feeds them, coursing through all their limbs,
mind stirs the mass and their fusion brings the world to birth.
From their union springs the human race and the wild beasts,
the winged lives of birds and the wondrous monsters bred
below the glistening surface of the sea. The seeds of life--
fiery is their force, divine their birth, but they
are weighed down by the bodies' ills or dulled
by earthly limbs and flesh that's born for death.
That is the source of all men's fears and longings,
joys and sorrows, nor can they see the heavens' light,
shut up in the body's tomb, a prison dark and deep.

[translated by Robert Fagles] 

My son said, "Dawn, you should listen to Radiolab podcasts," so I said ok and downloaded a couple onto my phone so that I could listen to them in the car instead of late-night hockey games between teams I don't follow. I had no idea what any of the podcasts would be about: I just saw a name in the title I didn't recognize and thought, Oh, I'll learn about this person.

Mystery Subject Number 1 turned out to be "John Luther Adams." You cultured city folks might have heard of him, but I had no idea who he was. Turns out he is a composer, based in Alaska, who at first listen might sound as if he writes sort of Brian Eno-esque tone poemy stuff (ick), but in actuality creates hypnotizing, extraordinarily physical evocations of landscape. He won a 2014 Pulitzer for a piece called Become Ocean, composed for three orchestras playing at the same time. It is like listening to a peaceful bay turn into a tidal wave.

His early work includes a series called SongBirdSongs. When he spoke about the process of creating these pieces, he said he started out by going into the woods and "taking dictation from birds." As all my Frost Place friends know, dictation is one of our primary tools for entering poems. So listening to Adams talk about dictation in this way was extraordinary.

The Radiolab interview was in fact a pastiche of a longer WQXR interview, "John Luther Adams: Bad Decisions and Finding Home," which I'll be listening to the next time I get into the car.

Here's a link to some samples from the SongBirdSongs. The mourning dove evocation is particularly eloquent.

In other news: I dreamed I had three beautiful little Jersey cows, clean and calm, all lined up to be milked. I checked their udders and was just getting ready to go hunt down the milking machines when the alarm clock went off and I woke up. Tom assures me that dream cows do not need to be milked on a schedule like regular cows do, but I am still a little worried about them.

Today Vox Populi is featuring "Company Town," one of the poems from my western Pennsylvania project. In fact, the epigraph that opens the poem is what triggered the entire endeavor.

In 2011 I came across this obituary in the New York Times:

E. B. Leisenring Jr., the scion of a powerful Pennsylvania coal family who led industry negotiators during a long and bitter mine workers’ strike in 1978, ignoring pleas by President Jimmy Carter and helping to win a settlement that largely favored mine owners, died on March 2 at his winter home in Aiken, S.C. He was 85.

I was shocked to discover that he had been a real man because my only connection was with the word Leisenring on a road sign. It was the name of a coal-company town close to where my grandfather had lived, on the border of Fayette and Westmoreland counties. I had never thought of the name as human but as something mythic: the Ring of Nibelung, perhaps. So when I read the obituary, I suddenly recognized the huge hole in my understanding of a place that I had loved so intensely as a child. I had lived there in the present, with a small girl's concentrated obsession on the details of the moment: the one giant step that rose up in the middle of the flat stone walkway between the house and the barn; the scent of mallow, as I sat behind the well house and crushed the weed between my palms; how my index finger felt when Daisy the cow accidentally squashed it against the fence with her horn; what it was like to fall unexpectedly through a trapdoor.

Reading the obituary turned out to be a different sort of trapdoor.

I haven't been outside yet, but I'm guessing we have 2 feet of snow out there, and, yes, it's still snowing, and the plow guy hasn't shown up yet, and, yes, Paul had school today because this is Maine.

The sky over the town of Guilford, Monday, as the storm clouds moved in

The sky over my road, Tuesday afternoon

How Ruckus weathered the storm

The storm may have been a bust in New York City, but it's behaving as advertised here. The winds feel hurricane-force; the tiny icy snowflakes whip into my face like porcupine quills. On the road, visibility is close to zero, and that's while I'm standing still. Anyone who tries to drive in this storm is either an idiot or desperate. I have no idea how much accumulation we'll get. Even now the drifting is considerable, and it's only been snowing since dawn.

You're not looking at camera blur here. You're looking at snow. The air is so full that I could almost mistake the flakes for smoke.

The wind in the trees sounds like a train.

Anna suggests that we should shovel now.

Love Letter to the Snowstorm

My dear enormous snowstorm--

All winter I have been waiting for you, but only your icy sisters have visited, and they are difficult guests--slippery of tongue and foot, a pretense of volubility and thaw but, in truth, a perpetual and wearisome impenetrability. Even the cat slides down the hill.

Of course you, too, will be nothing but trouble. The electrical lines will whimper, and the town plow will, once again, toss our mailbox into the ditch. But you will be a joyous trouble, concealing your sisters' tracks, concealing everything under your optimism. White, you will sigh against the window, is more beautiful than green, and you will lure me to wade into the woods, and I will stand very still under the trees as the north wind shakes up its featherbeds and you swirl and sing among the gusts.

And then, when I wade back to the house, and light the candles you require, and move all the refrigerated items onto the porch to stay cold, and melt snow to wash dishes or flush the toilet, and then pour wine or hot tea and stand at the window, watching the day fade behind you, I will be so happy. I will think, What more do I need on earth?--what more than this circle of warmth, the scent of minestrone on the stove, enough to share with any lost traveler who stumbles into the lamplight of this way station in the forest. No one will stumble in, of course. But dear enormous snowstorm, you will allow such a fairy tale to shimmer, and I will love to live in your story.

Your friend,

Dawn

P.S. If you make me drive in you, I will hate you with all the hate in my heart.

Sunday Morning: Frost, Lowell, Levertov, Milosz, Whitman

From "Robert Frost: 1875-1963" by Robert Lowell

The thinker and poet that most influenced [Frost] was Emerson. Both had something of the same highly urbane yet homemade finish and something of the same knack for verbal discovery. Both went about talking. Both leaned on and defied the colleges. A few of their poems are almost interchangeable. . . . Part of Frost was wary of Emerson. "Great is the art / Great shall be the manners of the bard." He knew better than anyone that his neighbors would find this manner boring and insufferable. He tried to make himself a man of many ruses, subtle surprises, and weathered agility. He was almost a farmer. Yet under the camouflage there was always the Brahma crouching, a Whitman, a great-mannered bard. If God had stood in his sunlight, he would have elbowed God away with a thrust or a joke.

**

Lines that cling: "He knew better than anyone that his neighbors would find this manner boring and insufferable." "He was almost a farmer." "If God had stood in his sunlight, he would have elbowed God away with a thrust or a joke." 

My neighbors are Frost's neighbors. I know what it is like to "make myself a [woman] of many ruses, subtle surprises, and weathered agility." I don't know what it is like to be a bard. But how many woman bards can you name? Is that a loss to the world? Or do our voices simply have a different potential for power?

**

From "Overland to the Islands" by Denise Levertov

Let's go--much as that dog goes,

intently haphazard.

**

The bard Whitman was the emperor of "intently haphazard." Was Frost? I'm less sure. Was Levertov? Perhaps she saw it as the way, but could not follow it with every cell of her body.

**

From "Abecadlo Milosza" by Czeslaw Milozz

No one will learn about Frost's own wounds and tragedies by reading his poetry; he left no clues. An appalling chain of misfortunes, numerous deaths in the family, madness, suicides, and silence about this, as if confirming his Puritan heritage, which demands that one conceal what is private behind a stoic facade. The worst part of all this is that in concerning oneself with him one is menaced by a sense of one's own particular existence. If the boundaries of the human personality are so fluid that we truly do not know who we are and are constantly trying on different changes of costume, how did Frost manage? It is impossible to grasp who he really was, aside from his unswerving striving toward his goal of fame, in an attempt to exact revenge for his own defeats in life.

I confess that I do not like his poetry.

**

"In concerning oneself with him one is menaced by a sense of one's own particular existence." I did not like Frost's poetry, until I was old enough to stare into that menace. Milosz's dislike is different: "I . . . am absolutely on Walt Whitman's side," he writes. But I don't see the two sides as entirely opposed.

**

From "The Most of It" by Robert Frost

He thought he kept the universe alone;

For all the answer he could wake

Was but the mocking echo of his own

From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake.

**

From "Whispers of Heavenly Death" by Walt Whitman

I need no assurances, I am a man who is pre-occupied of his own soul.