Tags: art as poet, art as experience, loving of art, anaphora, rhyme, imagery, juxtaposition, information management
Eating Poetry
Mark Strand
Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.
The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.
Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.
She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.
I am a new man.
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.
This poem is really fun, but also strikes me as a little unsettling. Strand conveys his love of poetry by painting himself as rather animal and wild and maniacal from a “normal person” perspective, which we largely get through the presence of the frightened librarian. Their juxtaposition seems to convey a message akin to Plato’s Allegory of the cave. It also evokes some sense of the Preface to Dorian Gray in that the speaker clearly loves the art he is consuming very dearly, even if it appears strange and useless to others–there is no merit to not seeing beauty in things, and really much of art is learning to see beauty in all sorts of things, even outside the mainstream narrative of what is beautiful. Notice how information is delivered to us mostly in short, choppy lines and the progression quite surreal, creating a primal and visceral experience of “eating” poems that is surrounded by confusion. Strand does a great job of dramatizing consuming poetry as a literally transformative experience here.