Romell Ian B.

De La Cruz R31

20 December 2013

EATING POETRY
The first impression given by the title of this poem, Eating Poetry, is one which is related to the culinary arts. But if one thinks over this again, one will see that the word eating is a representation of consuming, which is also a representation of, in this context, the act of reading and finishing what is being read. This, now, creates an expectation in the reader that this poem is about the act of reading poetry. In the first stanza, ink has been used to show that something with ink has been eaten. To clarify this point, an analogy I could make is one wherein someone is eating food with ketchup, which finds its way to the corners of the mouth. The second line tells of an incredible happiness, where others level of happiness fails in comparison. The second line is a description of the librarian. A simple use of a metaphor is given to create a stronger imagery of what the librarian looks like. The third stanza is a bit of a mystery. One reading I see is that by the mention of The poems are gone we see that there really has been a devouring of the written work and that the ideas in them are lost. To add to the imagery, the setting is described as dark. Now, the third line is mind-boggling. How could dogs be inside the library? We will get to that later. The next stanza tells more of these dogs. It shows how they are acting. The last line of this stanza, however, tells of how the librarian seems to be in distress. She starts stamping here feet and weeping. Why this is so, at the present, still is a mystery. Now, the last line holds the key in our understanding of the imagery and literary devices. I am a new man, I snarl at her and bark, I romp with joy in the bookish dark. One who snarls and barks is a dog. But it is said here that the persona is a man. What we can do to mend this disconnect is to get the idea that the man now possesses certain dog qualities, like the viciousness, which we can assume from the 4th stanza, and the sounds being produced. With the persona having dog-like traits and him mentioning of the other dogs in the basement, we can see that this might be a pack. A pack of what? A pack of people whose carnal desire is to consume poetry. It is their fulfilment. It is their drug. So how do we reconcile the ideas in the poem and the title? Well, there is the fact that the pack is devouring poetry. There really is the act of eating. But beyond the surface, we can see that the eating of poetry is an enjoyable activity and that it can be something which gives one an incredible feeling of elation that hooks you. That is, what I see, to be one of the possible interpretations of this poem by Mark Strand.