ABlog

One of my New Year’s resolutions was to read at least a page per day in the Library of America’s two-volume set American Poetry: The Twentieth Century. Having begun with Henry Adams, I’m now up to Robert Frost, which seems especially appropriate given that I’ve just paid what I think of as my annual visit to True Winter—my teaching stint at the Goddard MFA winter residency in Plainfield, Vermont. (How, by the way, did that quintessential poet of northern rigor manage to come by such an appropriate surname? Or is there a hitherto undisclosed principle of literary determinism at work, according to which name dictates tone and subject matter?)

I should perhaps qualify the statement that I think of the Goddard res. as a trip to True Winter. It would be more accurate to say that there are moments in which I manage simply to enjoy the wintriness of the scene, and others in which I become aware that I’m really constantly checking up on how far the old solidity of seasons has deteriorated. On this visit, for example, there was snow on the ground and more fell during the nine days of my stay. Visually, I had a pretty much undisturbed sense of New England January. But the fact is, it wasn’t very cold. Daytime temperatures frequently made it above freezing—just not far enough above to eradicate the snow. The icicle factor was impressive. On all but a couple of days, I could remain outside comfortably for an hour or more without a hat. And the preceding weeks had apparently been warmer; someone told me there’d been so much rain that Montpelier had a mudslide.

By the time I flew back to New York on January 10th, the warming trend had become almost embarrassing. “What’s this?” someone demanded as we emerged with open coats and unnecessary scarves onto the tarmac outside the U.S. Air terminal at LaGuardia. “Feels like spring!”

This past Saturday, January 14th, New York City saw a temperature high of 57 degrees Fahrenheit. By midnight, it had plunged to 16. “Spring” was evidently over for the moment. Three homeless men froze to death that night in Brooklyn and Queens.

So it goes with postmodern seasons. Isn’t it weird that we’ve managed to contrive a version of weather—a.k.a. a version of Earth-time--that corresponds to the spatial and cultural dislocations of globalization? Isn’t it utterly bizarre that wanting winter to behave more or less predictably (and no, I’m not discounting the historical fact of temperature fluctuations and January thaws) has come to seem like a form of historical nostalgia?

“The Arctic as we’ve known it is history,” said a specialist in climate change who was quoted in a recent New York Times article on the subject. Possibly the diction was intended to wake the public up to an under-acknowledged reality, but the statement seems to hint at the corollary: “Get used to it.”

I can’t get used to it. I hail from the 20th century, when Robert Frost wrote his poem “The Onset”:

Always the same, when on a fated night
At last the gathered snow lets down as white
As may be in dark woods, and with a song
It shall not make again all winter long
Of hissing on the yet uncovered ground….

The poem leans on two of poetry’s three pillars (love, death, and the changing of the seasons); while its surface conceit may be that winter’s assault poses a physical and psychological threat--

I know that winter death has never tried
The earth but it has failed: the snow may heap
In long storms an undrifted four feet deep
As measured against maple, birch, and oak,
It cannot check the peeper’s silver croak…

--its buttressing assumption is not that cold and darkness are far-ranging if limited powers; rather, it is that these powers belong to a cycle, a dialectic, that is immortal, foundational. The poem cannot—does not need to—explore the possibility of a threat deeper than the predictable, rhythmic challenge of the cold months and the fantasy of their possible lethal extension. What if the perceived enemy were permanently vanquished? Be careful what you wish for. (I don’t mean to suggest that old Father Robert really did want winter abolished—yet it’s a habit of mind endemic in northern climes, at least among European settler populations, to equate warmth with life. Why not? Historically, it worked.)

It is up to the poets of the 21st century to help us imagine how to deal with an Earth-time that's fundamentally out of joint—a climate in which, even in northern New England, there can be no November or December assumption of snow-blanketed surfaces persisting until the spring thaw. That “hissing on the yet uncovered ground” may be many times repeated, punctuated by mudslides. And the “peeper’s silver croak,” far from being threatened by the cold, may be in danger of eternal silence thanks to increased warmth, given the recent research finding that many of the world’s frog populations are vulnerable to a fungus that attacks as temperatures rise.

Last fall I was chatting with students in an undergraduate writing class. It was the very end of October, around Halloween, and I remarked on how strange it was to see people coming to class in flip-flops at that time of year. One young woman said, yes, it was odd, wasn’t it—she remembered distinctly that when she was a kid, it was always cold at Halloween, and you’d have to wear a coat over your costume when you went out trick or treating, but in recent years it always seemed to be warm. People are quite comfortable attending the Greenwich Village Halloween parade wearing skimpy costumes with nothing over them. And then she said the thing I keep thinking about, the thing I just didn’t know how to react to at the time and so didn’t respond to at all, the way I’ve sometimes ignored a socially offensive remark, knowing I ought to counter it but feeling embarrassed and so preferring not to acknowledge its implications. “But that’s impossible, isn’t it?” she said cheerily. “It couldn’t be that the weather is different now.” And I realized that this bright, attractive young woman whose personal essay for my class referred to her extensive use of the Internet and who will shortly graduate with a B.A. from a reputable liberal arts college had never heard of rapid, irreversible climate change.

So, a poem in progress:


Hot Button

Corn stubble swale, hills pale
First sight of brown bound I thought: dog
No—snow deer galumphing
(What did you expect, a bloody frangipani pulpit?)

Let’s just say I’m down
with repetition it’s the gist of January
Slow chew of shaggy-legged lovelies
rayed out from the daily bale

It’s snowing, we say
It’s shaping works okay
Revelation of contour raining
tracing weed stalks and headstones

Crow a jet pronouncement
on the pallor underlying
something I was feeling
in the morning
maybe warning

Distant wails of the damned
snowmobiles

Hoax repeats the parrot of my REM state
It’s a step in language learning
letting me supply the meaning
Legal Load Limit: 24,000 Pounds

That’s when I remember

Winter is so fragile
Just when I was racing
Just when I was stunning
Just when I was humming

Just when I was ticking
Just when I was kicking
Just when I was shining
Just when I was wailing

Narrow palette is relenting
Rigid splendor is retreating
Arctic fastness only seeming

Like a time-assaulted fabric
like a myth on celluloid

Under blur-moon
warmward earth trends

Just when I was reeling dreaming back