Retouching Scalar Landon

This essay discusses two interlocking approaches to Landon's poetry that help students think carefully about the poet's strategies of repetition, each offering new avenues of interpretation beyond assumptions of her pandering to mass audiences. First, students considered Landon's "retouching" of words and plots as a model of creative, masturbatory, feminine desire. Second, using word-frequency software, students examined keywords and lexical density to reread her poems and corpus.