Eating Poetry by Mark Strand
"Eating Poetry" by Mark Strand is a surreal poem that explores the imaginative act of consuming poetry instead of reading it, presenting a whimsical perspective on the relationship between literature and experience. The poem features a first-person speaker who finds himself in a library, delighting in the act of eating poetry, which leads to bizarre transformations and interactions. As the speaker indulges, he is confronted by a bewildered librarian, and strange events unfold, including the arrival of dogs from the basement, symbolizing a release of primal instincts and emotions.
The poem consists of six stanzas, characterized by simple language and free verse, which enhances its dreamlike quality. The absurdity of eating poetry results in vivid imagery, such as ink running from the speaker's mouth, reflecting a childlike joy that contrasts with the librarian's confusion and sadness. As the narrative progresses, the speaker undergoes a transformation, becoming almost doglike in behavior and reveling in the chaos unleashed by his actions.
Strand's use of straightforward diction and sentence structure creates an atmosphere of surrealism, inviting readers to ponder the implications of art and interpretation. The poem ultimately suggests a deep connection between the act of creating, consuming, and experiencing poetry, framed within a whimsical and imaginative context.
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Eating Poetry by Mark Strand
First published: 1968, in Reasons for Moving
Type of poem: Lyric
The Poem
“Eating Poetry” is a short poem in free verse, its eighteen lines divided into six stanzas. The title suggests either comedy or surrealism, and the poem contains elements of both. Mark Strand uses the first person to create a persona whose voice is Strand’s but whose experience is imaginary; indeed, the fact that the poem is a work of imagination is the main point.
The story of “Eating Poetry” is simple enough. The speaker is in a library, where he is eating, not reading, poetry. After he has eaten “The poems,” the speaker is confronted by a librarian, and dogs start on their way up from the basement; the speaker himself begins to behave like a dog. Eating the poetry seems to have changed the speaker.
The first sentence of the poem’s opening stanza carries the reader into a strange world. Not only is eating poetry an unlikely (even surreal) activity, but Strand’s description of the immediate physical result is also extraordinary. The ink in books of poetry is not usually runny, but if one can eat poetry, strange things may happen. “Eating Poetry” begins with an image confirming the title: “Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.” The image plays on the familiar metaphor “a voracious reader,” which suggests a hungry consumer of books. Strand takes the idea of consuming poetry literally. Instead of simply reading poetry voraciously, the speaker is actually eating it—and enjoying it.
The speaker’s childlike happiness in the first stanza is interrupted by the appearance of the librarian in the second stanza. Like the reader who may feel disoriented by the events in the poem, the incredulous librarian “does not believe what she sees.” Her sad eyes contrast sharply with the happiness of the narrator. In the third stanza, the focus of the poem shifts slightly from the speaker and the librarian to the setting. “The poems are gone,” and “The light is dim.” A pack of dogs is on its way up from the basement. By mentioning “the basement stairs,” Strand gives a detail that almost gives plausibility to the poem’s events.
The fourth stanza describes the dogs, which have rolling eyeballs and “blond legs” that “burn like brush.” The librarian, a woman, becomes agitated. The speaker’s having eaten the poems seems somehow to have unleashed the dogs from the basement of the library, or from the speaker’s mind. When, in the fourth stanza, the librarian—again, perhaps like the reader—“does not understand,” the speaker behaves like a dog himself and licks her hand, which makes her scream.
By the end of the poem, the speaker has been transformed into “a new man,” one who behaves like an excited dog. The lights have apparently completely gone out, so no one can read, but the speaker, doglike, romps with joy.
Forms and Devices
“Eating Poetry” is based on such simple statements and such straightforward language that its mysteriousness is hard to pin down, but it is precisely these simple statements in ordinary language that create the surrealistic atmosphere of the poem. Taken together with the title, the first sentence describes an implausible cause and effect. After that sentence, nothing in the poem is impossible. Each sentence in isolation makes perfect sense and describes a strange, but hardly impossible, situation. The strangeness of the poem, which rests in neither sentence structure nor diction, is the strangeness of imagination.
The free verse of “Eating Poetry” uses the rhythm of subject-verb-object sentence structure. “Eating Poetry” has no adverbs, few adjectives, and only the simplest verbs. Forms of “to be” are the most commonly used verbs in the poem. The lines are of unequal length, and the poem is not particularly musical in its sound effects.
Surrealism can be explained as a style of art—whether painting, literature, or music—in which things happen that defy the laws of physics. Ink dribbling from the mouth of someone who has eaten poems is a surrealistic image. Surrealist works often have much in common with dreams; in dreams, time and space operate by a different logic than that of one’s waking hours. Indeed, perhaps it is best not to categorize Strand’s poem as surrealism, but to think of it as a kind of a dream.
“Eating Poetry” contains no difficult or unusual vocabulary. The simple diction and sentence structure give the poem a childlike quality, and at the same time an assertive voice. Like events in a dream, the events of the poem happen one by one, and the speaker never explains the connections between them. The sentences that make up the poem are so straightforward that they can hardly be paraphrased; to paraphrase them is to be tempted to augment them to explain causes and effects which the poem does not explain. Are the lights dim and the dogs on their way because the speaker has eaten poetry, or because “The poems are gone”? The poem’s simple sentences do not say.
Strand uses the definite article to identify “the poems” and “the dogs” as if they were specific, but he never says what poems he ate or what kind of dogs are coming up from the basement. Because the poems are gone by the third stanza, the implication is that the speaker has eaten all the poems in the library.
Perfect rhymes appear in only two places—“understand” and “hand” in the fifth stanza, and “bark” and “dark” in the last two lines of the poem. These rhymes emphasize two important points in the poem. The climax of this poem occurs when the speaker licks the librarian’s hand, which he recognizes she does not understand. In the end, poetry is as wild and as ambiguous as the dog’s joyous bark in the dark.