Writing

- Howard Nemerov
p.118

This was a particularly interesting poem because the subject of the poem, was about writing itself. It depicts the flow of letters from a pen as a graceful and artful act, like ice skating. The poet also points out how powerful writing is. By simply moving the "small bones of the wrist" the world can largely be captured and recreated. Writing not only reflects outside images, but the poet also describes how the manner of writing, both based on content, and visual form can also reveal the nature of the writer.

The stanza division provides an almost a sobering image for the dreamy beauty of the written word that the poet has established earlier. Where in the beginning he was praising writing for its potentials and its forms, the second stanza bluntly points out that writing is not all that its made out to be. He writes that Writing intrinsically lacks the feel of the real world. The curvy tracks of an ice skater on ice are merely a shadow of what was there before, the tracks can never recreate the grandeur of movement of the skaters, or the wind created in their wake. The poem itself lacks any formal poem structure, and seems to be more of a short essay written in a fluid manner, although the poem does end with a slight rhyming scheme, but it seems at odds with the rest of the piece.