Jump to ContentJump to Main Navigation
The Poetry of Everyday LifeStorytelling and the Art of Awareness$
Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content.
The Poetry of Everyday Life: Storytelling and the Art of Awareness

Steve Zeitlin

Print publication date: 2016

Print ISBN-13: 9781501702358

Published to Cornell Scholarship Online: May 2017

DOI: 10.7591/cornell/9781501702358.001.0001

Show Summary Details
Page of

PRINTED FROM Cornell University Press SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.cornell.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright University of Cornell University Press, 2021. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in Cornell for personal use. date: 03 March 2021

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
DOI:10.7591/cornell/9781501702358.003.0024

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

Cornell Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.

Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.

To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.