03 November 2006

Explicating at work!

While I was noodling on my story, I remembered a quote from "Death of a Hired Man" by Robert Frost pertaining to home, so, since I was at work, I went online and found the poem and got the quote. And then I started thinking about Elizabeth Bishop, one of the poets I studied while in grad school. I really loved her stuff, and I missed reading poetry.

So I went online and found "The Moose" at Poets.org (note: be sure to get a proper website when looking up poems -- some websites might mess up the formatting, or the spacing, or some dang thing). I printed it off, trimmed it to size, and tacked it up over my workstation.

I have been very happy with this arrangement. When I read poetry out of a book, I tend to skim along because I have this urge to read as many pages as possible within a short time span. I don't linger over the text, make connections. But with Bishop's poem on my wall, laid completely out, I can move around in the text and find those connections so easily (no page-flipping!), think about the poem as I work, take short glances, or long glances. So I can think about the dogs that keep appearing in the poem, or the use of the colors red and pink, try to figure out that "twin" thing she has going on at the beginning, and the thing with the houses and churches and the moose.

In other words, I wish I'd thought to do this long ago!

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