The snowman we made last night had been trampled this morning when we awoke, by a chaos of children. His twig arms lay under snow like avalanche victims. His carroty nose was simply no longer present at the scene. His small stone eyes were unaccounted for. He was a gone snowman. He was the snowman who wasn't there. What drives someone to eradicate a snowman? Is it the nature of the materials? Is being built of snow an invitation to break what will melt into air anyway? Nature abhors a melting creature. What isn't solid gets knocked down to size. Molecules scatter, crystals dissipate, the melting white gentle thing dissolves and is forgotten, in the blizzard that is creation, in the murder that is the blizzard. One has to have a mind like an icepick to pick apart a snowman, or just be a wild child, running across snow, perhaps never so deeply seen before. Snowmen are invisible in snow, like poems are in a world of prose.
THAT HANDSOME MAN A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought. Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to that
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Best to you,
J