PAUL CHRISTENSEN

Vermont has gone into deep storage, buried under a foot of sticky snow, with drifts reaching up to a few feet in some places. The silence is as pure as a church on Saturday. Hardly any traffic passes in front of the house, except for the snow plow, a lumbering machine with a large orange blade in front and a sand spreader on the back. The driver, they’re always young, it seems, likes to gallop past our place, and occasionally, if the slush in the yard is plentiful, throw up a

I was on a trek with my wife looking for protest poetry for a book I had proposed to Oxford University Press. They gave me some advance money and sent me off to find old bar room pamphlets, “pomes pennyeach,” those poems you could pick up out of a box next to a cash register in lieu of getting back a few pennies from your other purchases. And song books, lots of song books for a century (19th) that enjoyed a lot of communal singing. That tradition of singing together in beer