I just thought of it:
I wrote this poem in 2005 while teaching a poetry class in which the students wrote poems addressed to friends. The emphasis was on being private in public, writing in a way that would make sense to the poem’s recipient but might seem cryptic to others. Now the poem seems cryptic to me. The only frame of reference I can remember for it: snow. Snow was general all over the northeast and midwest.
Rob Zseleczky (1957–2013)
Well, perhaps I'm being obvious, but it echoes Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and Stevens' "The Snow Man."
ReplyDeleteYes, Keats. What I should’ve written is that I don’t remember the life stuff that got into the poem — whatever it was that accounted for the sign in the title, the empty pockets.
ReplyDeleteWhere do you hear Stevens?
It's about snow and Stevens' poem ends:
ReplyDeleteAnd, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
Now I see — I didn’t think about repetition at the end.
ReplyDelete