from "Thoreau" by Cole Swensen

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend July 2, 2014   from “Thoreau”   Cole Swensen

In the essay “A Winter Walk,” which predated the more famous essay           “Walking” by a few years, Thoreau paid particular attention to the astonishing                array of whites from fog to snow to frost to the crystals growing outward on threads           of light. The fact that white is separately known. That it is its own wildness,                       entirely exterior, like all weather you notice is a version of an open room coming                     through the wind in prisms. White holds light in a suspended state,                            unleashing it later across a field of snow or a sheet of water at just the right angle to                make the surface a solid, and on we go walking. Goethe’s Theory of Colors depicted                each one as an intense zone of human activity overflowing its object into                    feeling there is a forest through which something white is flying through a wash of              white, which is the presence of all colors until red, for instance, is needed for a bird or        green for a world.            Copyright @ 2014 by Cole Swensen. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “Thoreau was, among so many other things, a marvelous walker; he used walking not only as a mode of transportation but also as mode of observation—it allowed him to see his world, not just with his eyes, but with his entire body. This piece is from a series that tries to capture the rhythm of that intimate engagement.” —Cole Swensen   Cole Swensen is the author of Gravesend (University of California Press, 2012). She teaches at Brown University and lives in Providence, Rhode Island. Most Recent Book by Swensen   Gravesend (University of California Press, 2012) “Of Many Worlds in This World” by Margaret Cavendish “Sonnet” by Bill Knott “Photographs of the Interiors of Dictators' Houses” by Albert Goldbarth Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038