- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Foreword
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Kindred Spirits
- 2 Intimacy in Language
- 3 Laughter for Dessert
- 4 The Poetry of Ping-Pong
- 5 Days of Chess and Backgammon
- 6 Inventing a Language for Love
- 7 Poetry on the Porch
- 8 All My Trials
- 9 The AIDS Poets
- 10 Oh Did You See the Ashes Come Thickly Falling Down?
- 11 The POEMobile Dreams of Peace
- 12 Free Market Flavor
- 13 The Poetry in Science
- 14 Navigating Transitions
- 15 The Human Unit of Time
- 16 Your Body as Symbol
- 17 Intimations of Immortality
- 18 God Is in the Details
- 19 Breath on the Mirror
- 20 The Best Stories versus My Story
- 21 The Grease Lamp’s Flicker and Flare
- 22 Lion’s Gate
- 23 Rock and Word
- For Further Reading
- Permissions
Rock and Word
Rock and Word
Building a Stone Wall as a Lesson in Poetry
- Chapter:
- (p.244) 23 Rock and Word
- Source:
- The Poetry of Everyday Life
- Author(s):
Steve Zeitlin
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
This chapter suggests that building a stone wall offers a lesson in poetry. The experience of writing a poem embodies a joyful feeling: the words take your shape as you wander through creek beds of syllables, with your own life rolling over them. Stones, like words, are everywhere; the trick to building a dry stone wall is to find stones that fit perfectly into one another and form a structure that will not collapse under its own weight. Stone walls, despite being made of one of the heaviest objects on the planet, all have a lightness and delicacy in the way the stones touch and balance. The best poems—made of the lightest things on the planet (words)—demonstrate a sturdiness, with the words coupled so perfectly that one cannot be removed without the whole structure crumbling. Writing a poem requires balancing sound, humor, feeling, and thought to support one another.
Keywords: building, stone walls, poetry, words, stones, poems
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- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Foreword
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Kindred Spirits
- 2 Intimacy in Language
- 3 Laughter for Dessert
- 4 The Poetry of Ping-Pong
- 5 Days of Chess and Backgammon
- 6 Inventing a Language for Love
- 7 Poetry on the Porch
- 8 All My Trials
- 9 The AIDS Poets
- 10 Oh Did You See the Ashes Come Thickly Falling Down?
- 11 The POEMobile Dreams of Peace
- 12 Free Market Flavor
- 13 The Poetry in Science
- 14 Navigating Transitions
- 15 The Human Unit of Time
- 16 Your Body as Symbol
- 17 Intimations of Immortality
- 18 God Is in the Details
- 19 Breath on the Mirror
- 20 The Best Stories versus My Story
- 21 The Grease Lamp’s Flicker and Flare
- 22 Lion’s Gate
- 23 Rock and Word
- For Further Reading
- Permissions