Yvor Winters

I was sitting here, listening to the hum of my electric baseboard heater, watching the smoke imprint the frozen air outside-- the down feather factory still processes its feathers in full oily brooklyn glory. I wrote a poem ('smokestack')! I can just see the edge of the smoke, the bottom, its "source", wispy blown. The strange thing-- the MINUTE I finished the poem, the smoke stopped (as if it had never been there). Its going again now, but I think it is different smoke. My room is the only warm one in the house. I hear distant music and traffic. I feel the cold from outside. I am safe and warm with smoke-view, lamp-view, book-view.

I started taking notes on a poem I want to write tomorrow-- to keep the incoporated themes of glass (filament, spun, sugar, wire, bent hair) and add to it glass-pane transparency, also filament fiber-opticks, sea-creatures... Also I was pleased with the use of words like webbed, fringed, edged, laced.... and thinking about them.

I stated reading Yvor Winters (1900-1968). (Sam and I found some records of him reading his poetry aloud, this was one of our christmas presents to ourselves). As I was reading I began to wonder which deserts Winters had spent time in, he mentions a blue lake, a "canyon, among the mountains," might this be Taos? I was just about to start researching this when I read his next poem:

'The Solitude of Glass' (!!!!!!!)

No ferns, but
Fringed rock (!!!!!)
Spreads on hills
To cover us.

On stone of pollen
At the bend of sight
Stiff rocks
Cast violet eyes

Like rays of shadow,
Roam
Impenetrable
In a cold of glass--

The sun, a lichen
Spreading on the sky
For days
Behind the cold;

The burros,
Like iron-filings
Gathered to
The adamant.

(............................................)