Mind of Winter

Author: Alan

  • Two by Kooser

    Anne by Ted Kooser Her body was the cellar under her life. The marks of the old floods rounded the walls. Everything that she’d had had been carried outside and burned on the lawn. There was nothing left but a few broken jars and some spiders, eating each other under the stairsteps. Everyone seemed to…

  • That’s It.

    A Life by Howard Nemerov Innocence? In a sense. In no sense! Was that it? Was that it? Was that it? That was it.

  • Thaw; Kooser

    I have been gone from this page for a long time and it makes me quite sad to look at the lovely things that have been written months ago and gone unanswered, unacknowledged, unheard by me. Can I respond after such a wintry absence? Do comments in cyberspace keep their flavor when thawed? Mike, your…

  • Thanks, Mike, for that post.

    Thanks, Mike, for that post. I enjoyed it very much. I’d like to launch a few brief volleys on the topic of death. First, I, myself, don’t make the leap to permanence when I think about how death bears on question of whether life is meaningful. I don’t think life would only be meaningful if…

  • Poetry locale

    Hey! Can we do poetry this week at our place? It would help me out and it looks like chez Jon and Sam is the place to be FRI night. If its inconvenient, though, no worries.

  • A little alliteration ala Swinburne

    I apologize for being so out of things and unresponsive lately. I am so deeply drenched in the depths of the unpoetic and pathetic linguistic that the pressure is poised to prompt me to implode. But I’m hoping to take a break from it all for a couple hours to do our thing thursday night.…

  • In a Disused Graveyard

    Its worth contrasting Auden’s cemetary with Frost’s graveyard: In a Disused Graveyard by Robert Frost The living come with grassy tread To read the gravestones on the hill; The graveyard draws the living still, But never anymore the dead. The verses in it say and say: “The ones who living come today To read the…

  • Island Cemetery

    I have mentioned a couple of Auden poems from Homage to Clio, the book from which came The More Loving One. Here is one of them that I like a lot. My only trouble with it is the “thank our lucky star” line. Was this less of a cliche when the poem was written or…

  • Where and Bueno?

    Jon’s place. 6:30. Bueno.

  • A second poem

    Heidi’s favorite poet is Mary Oliver. Contemporary. Female. A writer of books on meter, sound and other matters of form. Her own poetry is only indirectly so sturctured. I found a poem by her that I think would be a good counterpoint to the Swinburne. Its called the sun. Its quite different in tone and…