From the Ether
editor’s note
*
“One must have a mind of winter . . .”
—Wallace Stevens
On Winter
By this point in the season, I find myself tiring of the winterish beast I
become who craves extra calories, piles of polartec, and a good blaze in the fireplace even here
where I sit in relatively mild Northern California (rain-rain-rain).
“And have been cold a long time
Our far-flung editorial team find themselves in various stages of flu and colds
and work-induced overload. The new year’s determinations to organize this
office, this desk, these piles, the writing, update systems, submit to contests
and journals and write new stuff and revise and take time to think and read run
at last aground in fresh piles.
“To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
That’s what we’re supposed to do in the winter, right, hunker down in some form
of hibernation, to know quiet and reflect in a fallow season of introspection
and restoration. To be as still as a winter landscape.
“For the listener, who listens in the snow,
February telescopes toward spring, even with Leap Year’s extra day. The season
inclines to the next, whether in green daffodil spears, buds swelling along wet
limbs, or packages of pink marshmallow Peeps stacked in the aisles at Longs
Drugstore where I buy another bottle of Robitussin.
“And, nothing himself, beholds
Time is weird and all we have, and what we can’t have.
“Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
It is with such a mind of winter that we offer the Winter 2008 issue of the DMQ
Review, buoyed by the work of our contributors, the generous images of featured
artist Nick Patten, and our continued collaboration with Peter Davis’
Poet’s Bookshelf in the work of featured poet
Shanna Compton. We are ever appreciative of our contributors and you
our readers who move with us, season to season.
Please find the full text of the Wallace Stevens poem I’ve been so liberally
referencing, below.
From the ether,
Sally Ashton, Editor in Chief
Snow Man
by Wallace Stevens
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces 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.