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  • Sixth Year:Iron
  • Elizabeth Knapp (bio)
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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

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.

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