Arts
John Haines wrote some of the most gorgeous, "natural landscape" poetry in U. S. literary history. The heir of Frost and maybe even Whitman, he took on his Alaskan world and transformed it into something mythic. This small lyric poem is not about the "outback" where he made his life. Rather, it's about an urban world turned upside down by a giant snowfall--about the ways the natural world can still interrupt the civilized myth we all believe, about the ways that our precarious perch in our urban lives can give way under the weight of something as light as snow. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, for a reading and exploration of this provocative and evocative poem.