from "Thoreau"
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.
Credit
Copyright @ 2014 by Cole Swensen. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-a-Day on July 2, 2014.
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
Author
Cole Swensen
Cole Swensen was born in Kentfield, California, in 1955. She received her BA degree and MA from San Francisco State University, and a PhD in comparative literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Swensen is the author of more than ten collections of poetry, including Landscapes on a Train (Nightboat Books, 2015); Gravesend (University of California Press, 2012), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry; The Glass Age (Alice James Books, 2007); The Book of a Hundred Hands (University of Iowa Press, 2005); Goest (Alice James Books, 2004), a finalist for the National Book Award; Such Rich Hour (University of Iowa Press, 2001); Oh (Apogee Press, 2000); Try (University of Iowa Press, 1999), winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize and winner of the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award; Noon (Sun & Moon Press, 1997), winner of the New American Writing Award; Numen (Burning Deck Press, 1995), a finalist for the PEN West Award in Poetry; and New Math (William Morrow & Co., 1988), winner of the National Poetry Series.
Swensen’s translations of contemporary French poetry include Physis (2007, by Nicolas Pesquès); Future, Former, Fugitive (2004, by Olivier Cadiot); Oxo (2004, by Pierre Alferi ); Island of the Dead (2002, Jean Frémon), which was awarded the 2004 PEN USA Award for Literary Translation; Bayart (2001, by Pascalle Monnier); Art Poetic (1999, by Olivier Cadiot). With David St. John, she edited the anthology American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry (W. W. Norton, 2009).
About her work, poet Michael Palmer writes, “Cole Swensen attends fixedly to those minute nuances and wanderings of language whereby the poem builds its particular perceptual logic. The result might well be called a ‘new math,’ or perhaps a calculus of light, shedding new light on things immediately before the eye.”
Swensen received a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation in 2006 and taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa until 2012 when she joined the faculty of Brown University’s Literary Arts Program.
Date Published: 2014-07-02
Source URL: https://poets.org/poem/thoreau