Waterbird Board: Space ten

So . . . this is taken from Louise Gluck's "Snow," from the collection of poems titled Ararat. There's the obvious connection of references to snow, for Frost's poem (Snowy Woods, etc.), all puns intended. But let's disregard that, perhaps it's too "surfacy". If you want to go deeper, I read both the Frost poem and the Knowles poem as being very simple and pure, conceptually speaking. Aside from the simplicity, I was also struck by their sprawling ambiguity (especially in the Knowles selection). If the excerpt from Gluck that I've chosen isn't simple enough (albeit highly loaded), I think her philosophy of poetics should speak for itself:

"What I share with [poets in my generation] is ambition; what I dispute is its definition. I do not think that more information always makes a richer poem. I am attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence. The unsaid, for me, exerts great power: often I wish an entire poem could be made in this vocabulary. It is analogous to the unseen for example, to the power of ruins, to works of art either damaged or incomplete. Such works inevitably allude to larger contexts; they haunt because they are not whole, though wholeness is implied: another time, a world in which they were whole, or were to have been whole, is implied. There is no moment in which their first home is felt to be the museum . . . It seems to me that what is wanted, in art, is to harness the power of the unfinished. All earthly experience is partial. Not simply because it is subjective, but because that which we do not know, of the universe, of mortality, is so much more vast than that which we do know. What is unfinished or has been destroyed participates in these mysteries. The problem is to make a whole that does not forfeit this power."

Sorry for the excessive quoting, but it's gorgeous. This is the most candid I have been all term . . .