Welcome back to the Daily Poem here on the Close Freeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern.

Today's December 16th, 2019. And today's poem is by Wallace Stevens, an American poet, a modernist poet who lived from 1879 to 1955.

He was a Pennsylvanian, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his collected poems in

1955. And notably, he spent much of his adult life working as an executive for an insurance

company while writing in between around his day job. And despite that, he wound up producing

one of the most interesting bodies of poetic work of the 20th

century. The poem that I'm going to read today is called The Snowman, one of his more well-known

poems in addition to the idea of order at Key West, which I've read on the podcast before.

But this is how it goes. The Snowman by Wallace Stevens.

One must have a mind of winter to regard the frost and the boughs of the pine trees

crested with snow, and have been cold a long time to behold the junipers shagged with ice,

the spruce is rough in the distant glitter of the January sun,

and not to think of any misery in the sound of the wind,

in the sound of a few leaves,

which is the sound of the land full of the same wind that is blowing in the same bare place for the listener,

who listens in the snow,

and nothing himself beholds nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

So this is a complex poem.

Stevens is probably a poet who I should read a lot more.

I should probably be just bringing a lot more of his poetry to you.

It's a little bit intimidating for me in some ways to

approach Wallace Stevens poetry, not because I don't like it or don't like spending time with it,

...