“One must have a mind of winter,” begins Wallace Stevens’s 1921 poem “The Snow Man,” which moves from describing iconically icy and desolate imagery of winter—“the pine-trees crusted with snow,” “the junipers shagged with ice”—to pointing out the human beholder’s subjectivity as the agent of projecting this wintry outlook. This week, write a poem that takes inspiration from Stevens’s first line and explore what it means to you to have “a mind of winter.” Does it entail nothingness, quietude, withholding, generosity, cheer, beauty, love? How does your selection of seasonal associations determine your poem’s tonal direction? You might even experiment with approaching this prompt more than once, when your mood about the season feels distinctively different.
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Author: Writing Prompter