A World of White and Snowy Scents

Still one would want more, one would need more,
More than a world of white and snowy scents.
-Wallace Stevens

Right now, I can’t imagine beyond snow.  It’s been falling all day again, though this time, not to much effect.  Deer tracks run everywhere:  they veer toward the hemlock, then, foiled by the fencing, veer back to open ground.  The paths break into ragged patches where deer scraped through to get at grass.

The Problem with Wallace Stevens

Our poet-friend came visiting, The New York Review of Books in hand, with Dan Chiasson’s review of the new Selected Poems by Wallace Stevens.  We pored over the review, trying to find in poems the things Chiasson said were there to see.  I felt I had tiptoed up behind a group of elders, Helen Vendler and Harold Bloom chief among them, peaking over their shoulders for a glimpse of Susanna.