Snow On Snow On Snow

I was quite wrong the other day when I confidently predicted I wouldn't see snow on Christmas Day. I've been deeply immersed in the stuff for those parts of the day when I enjoyed reading some segments of Archie Ammons's deeply imaginative immersive epic The Snow Poems. 

When I started on the long poem I forgot that I could easily check the dates of the individual poems comprising the whole in the notes at the back of Volume 1, 1955 - 1977 of The Complete Poems, so I didn't realise, until I checked this morning, that by an odd coincidence I'd reached the poem written on the actual Christmas Eve of 1975 and in the sequence of days that followed (Ammons  writing a poem a day) there was plenty of snow around - wonderfully represented in the great poet's endlessly inventive versifying.

Actually I'd not enjoyed the previous long poem sequence in the volume, Sphere, the Form of a Motion, from 1974, as much as I'd expected I would. It struck me as an unusually abstract, obscurely difficult work. I appreciated it without loving it, if you know what I mean, and that implies a degree of struggling needed to keep going in places. So it was relief to find Ammons on absolute top form in his next extended sequence. Indeed, the editor of the Complete reckons that AA declared The Snow Poems his favourite of the long poems towards the end of his life. I'm finding it such a flowing read that I now think I might meet my target of completing Volume 1 by the year's end, but, I must say, I doubt I'll move right onto Volume 2, 1978 - 2005 next. I've been so immersed in this stuff for so long (the poetry, not the snow) that I think it might be time for a break and a return to progress on William Carlos Williams since I've still got the second volume of the WCW Collected to enjoy.

Compliments of the season to all and hoping you've had a good one, whether snowed in or tropically sweating, whether struggling or flowingly at ease, or whatever!