- Sixth Year:Iron
Elizabeth Knapp, poetry
After a heated debate about the natureof inspiration (poetry versus prose),with you arguing that idea begets word,and not vice versa, as I believe is the case
with verse (always the music first),which was prompted by a discussionof Dickinson's envelope poems,and whether she wrote the poem
to fit the shape of the paper, or she shapedthe paper to fit the poem (both, I think),I decided to try it your way: to holdthe idea of the poem in mind
before ever hearing its words,to follow it like an iron horsethrough the valley of imagination,until it disappeared at a bend in the track
into a landscape I couldn't see.Enter these cast iron bookends(knights in shining armor just for Gus),signposts to mark where one mile ends
and another begins in the uncharted roadof matrimony. Forgive me, love,I was running out of time. I didn't knowwhat I would give until I wrote this. [End Page 270]
elizabeth knapp is the author of The Spite House, winner of the 2010 De Novo Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in AGNI On-line, Barrow Street, Best New Poets, The Journal, Mid-American Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and River Styx, among others. She is currently associate professor of English at Hood College in Frederick, MD, where she lives with her family.