Eating Poetry
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.
—Mark Strand
I recently encountered this poem again, years after I first enjoyed it. Mark Strand was the first poet I loved in college, the first man whose words and line breaks seemed to make sense to me. I had never read poetry so honest, poetry so vulnerable—or even poetry which mentioned the speaker’s penis (“I give up my penis which whispers encouragement to my thighs” in “Giving Myself Up”). I think in some small or maybe even large way, Mark Strand’s poems encouraged me to write and to live honestly.
A year or two after I first started reading Mark Strand’s Selected Poems, I damaged my copy while moving out of my dorm room. It was raining and I was careless, and I always meant to buy another copy. I didn’t. And somewhere around the time I stopped reading Mark Strand’s poetry, I stopped writing my own. This is mere coincidence, I’m sure—though I will admit that without simple and honest poems like his to guide me, I began to fear poetry. It seemed so complex and so very important; each word and each line seemed to carry a great responsibility and a debt to the past. I couldn’t write it. I wouldn’t write it.
I wrote creative nonfiction instead. I envied poets but I found solace in prose. (I think I am not alone.) But lately, in the past year and a half, I’ve begun to read poetry again because of a Modern Poetry class I took in graduate school. It’s taken me a long, long time to love poetry again, and with this love comes the desire to write it. I think I will start reading Selected Poems again. I think I will start making poems.
-R
My question to you: Who was the first poet you loved?
