Kay Ryan is new to me, but thanks to your fine introduction, I’ll be looking for more of her work. I was wondering who our current Poet Laureate was – seriously, I actually was wondering that just the other day ;)

I wish more books came with CDs. I’d probably be able to “read” more of the books that I’ve wanted to pick up.

When I participated in a poetry workshop for teachers in the summer of ‘07, the initial explanation of poetry is that it is indirect speech; trying to say one thing in terms of another. Given that, what if we imagine that Ryan’s bear is a poet and the “You” is the reader. What if buttoning up the forest is a metaphor for using figurative language! (A metaphor for metaphors!) After all, the bear isn’t telling us we can’t come into the forest at all, just that we need to find another entrance than the one we expected to find.

And the “dark” side of the poem is not something the bear (=poet) has put there, it is something that you (=reader) have brought to the scene. Maybe the poet is just telling us to come to the forest without our wolves and sticks. After all, the bears have buttons for eyes; they don’t attack us, they just use buttons to thwart our aggression – they can’t be too harmful. If the message is that we have to be less aggressive when we approach a poem, this would be a great companion piece for the hilarious poem by Billy Collins (also a U.S. poet laureate) called, “Introduction to Poetry.”

At the same poetry workshop, the poet Mary Jo Salter (editor of the Norton Anthology) pointed us toward some good examples of rhyme and wordplay in modern poems. She described the poet Paul Muldoon as, “The most important thing to happen to rhyme in a long time.” This fascinated me. How could there be new developments in the world of rhyme? I never really thought of rhyme as a genre – more of a tool or a game; a means to an end.

I like the way that Ryan uses alliteration in roughly the same spots in each stanza – paws/pad, tab/tail, flap/forest, etc. I wonder whether this is part of the exciting new developments in rhyme, or if I just never paid attention before.