Eating Poetry Analysis

With a title like "Eating Poetry," we get the feeling from the start that what we're reading isn't going to fit into any conventional boxes of form and meter. And in this case, we're right on the m...

Where would we be without our poetry-eating dog-man speaker? Imagine if we heard this poem from the librarian's perspective. It would no doubt sound a whole lot different. But since we get a firsth...

Okay, let's see: we've got a librarian, a guy eating poems, and some burning dogs climbing up the stairs. Suffice it to say that we can't exactly pin down any sort of conventional setting in "Eatin...

The lines are succinct and Strand's language is straightforward in "Eating Poetry." Even if the actual content seems ridiculous, the sound of the poem comes to us so matter-of-factly that we can't...

If Strand's title "Eating Poetry" doesn't set us up for some pretty weird stuff, we're not sure what would. The very idea of eating something that's not only inedible, but also the very thing we're...

If you come across another Strand poem, it'll more than likely look something like a dream or manifestation of the speaker's thought process. In other words, you're bound to see a lot of shifts in...

If it weren't for those burning dogs and the fact that our speaker is eating poetry, we would have given this one an easier rating. But all the weird stuff, no matter how plain the language is, kee...

Strand was kind of an "underground pop star" in the 1960s. (Source.)In 1987, smarty-pants Strand was the recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" Award. (Source.)Strand was also the U.S. Poet Laureate fro...

The librarian doesn't look too sexy in this poem, but then again neither does the poetry-eating speaker. And don't even get us started about the hellish dogs. It's all rather dreamlike here, but in...