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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mark Strand
Mark Strand
Mark Strand was born on Canada's Prince Edward Island on April 11,...
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FURTHER READING
Poems about Eating
A Wicker Basket
by Robert Creeley
Apples
by Grace Schulman
Breakfast
by Minnie Bruce Pratt
Dead Horse
by Thomas Lux
Dream In Which I Meet Myself
by Lynn Emanuel
Eating The Bones
by Ellen Bass
Egg
by Aleš Šteger
The Book of the Dead Man (Food)
by Marvin Bell
To a Poor Old Woman
by William Carlos Williams
Woman on Twenty-Second Eating Berries
by Stanley Plumly
Poems Teens Like
Howl, Parts I & II
by Allen Ginsberg
A Muse
by Reginald Shepherd
Alice at Seventeen: Like a Blind Child
by Darcy Cummings
Ave Maria
by Frank O'Hara
Ballad
by Sonia Sanchez
Charlotte Brontë in Leeds Point
by Stephen Dunn
Cicada
by John Blair
Coach Losing His Daughter
by Jack Ridl
Dangerous for Girls
by Connie Voisine
Deer Hit
by Jon Loomis
Falling
by James Dickey
Ground Swell
by Mark Jarman
homage to my hips
by Lucille Clifton
Hyper-
by David Baker
In Knowledge of Young Boys
by Toi Derricotte
Lady Tactics
by Anne Waldman
Mairsy and Dosey
by Sharon Olds
Making a Fist
by Naomi Shihab Nye
Mermaid Song
by Kim Addonizio
Notes from the Other Side
by Jane Kenyon
Patience
by Kay Ryan
Persephone, Falling
by Rita Dove
Possum Crossing
by Nikki Giovanni
Sticks
by Thomas Sayers Ellis
Thanks
by W. S. Merwin
That Sure is My Little Dog
by Eleanor Lerman
The Changing Light
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
The Fist
by Derek Walcott
The New Higher
by John Ashbery
The Pomegranate
by Eavan Boland
The Wild Iris
by Louise Glück
The Young Man's Song
by W. B. Yeats
White Apples
by Donald Hall
Who Will Know Us?
by Gary Soto
Workshop
by Billy Collins
Related Prose
Ars Poetica: Poems about Poetry
Poems for Teens
Poems about Poetry
Epistles, Book II, Ars Poetica
by Horace
Poetry as Insurgent Art [I am signaling you through the flames]
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
A Book Of Music
by Jack Spicer
A True Poem
by Lloyd Schwartz
Adam's Curse
by W. B. Yeats, read by James Wright
Always on the Train
by Ruth Stone
And It Came to Pass
by C. D. Wright
Ars Poetica
by Eleanor Wilner
Ars Poetica
by Archibald MacLeish
Ars Poetica (cocoons)
by Dana Levin
Art Class
by James Galvin
Arthur's Anthology of English Poetry
by Laurence Lerner
Because You Asked about the Line Between Prose and Poetry
by Howard Nemerov
Blue or Green
by James Galvin
Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks
by Jane Kenyon
Broadway
by Mark Doty
Diving into the Wreck
by Adrienne Rich, read by Anne Waldman
Endnote
by Hayden Carruth
Envoi
by William Meredith
Ground Swell
by Mark Jarman
How to Read a Poem: Beginner's Manual
by Pamela Spiro Wagner
If It All Went Up in Smoke
by George Oppen
Instructions to Be Left Behind
by Marvin Bell
Introduction to Poetry
by Billy Collins
Languages
by Carl Sandburg
O Black and Unknown Bards
by James Weldon Johnson
On the Subject of Poetry
by W. S. Merwin
Poet's Work
by Lorine Niedecker
Poetry
by Marianne Moore
Poetry Is a Destructive Force
by Wallace Stevens
Prefix: Finding the measure
by Robert Kelly
Some Part of the Lyric
by Gregory Orr
Speech Alone
by Jean Follain
Take the I Out
by Sharon Olds
Teaching the Ape to Write Poems
by James Tate
The Allure of Forms
by Coral Bracho
The Art of Poetry [excerpt]
by Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux
The Bargain
by Cyrus Cassells
The Bear
by Galway Kinnell
The Composition of the Text
by Adriano Spatola
The Difference between a Child and a Poem
by Michael Blumenthal
The Indications [excerpt]
by Walt Whitman
The Poem as Mask
by Muriel Rukeyser
The Poems I Have Not Written
by John Brehm
The Snow and the Plum — II
by Lu Mei-P'o
The Uses of Poetry
by William Carlos Williams
This Bridge, Like Poetry, is Vertigo
by Marie Ponsot
What He Thought
by Heather McHugh
Why I Am Not a Painter
by Frank O'Hara
Workshop
by Billy Collins
Adopt a Poet | Add to Notebook | E-mail to Friend | Print
Eating Poetry  
by Mark Strand

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. 



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From Selected Poems by Mark Strand. Copyright © 1979, 1980 by Mark Strand. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
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