Trying to analyze the meaning of “Eating Poetry” is kind of like trying to analyze the meaning of a Giorgio de Chirico painting. Not all surrealism is the same. The comparison to de Chirico is far more apt than a comparison to a Salvador Dali painting or a Rene Magritte. To call “Eating Poetry” an exercise in surrealism is not without cause, but there are levels of surrealism in the written word as well. Dali’s most famous painting features melting clocks and other bizarre imagery that bears really very little resemblance to the real world. The paintings of de Chirico, by contrast, are solidly situated within recognizable reality. That said, the long shadows and silhouetted figures create a sense of menace that is palpable but very difficult to establish.
The imagery provided in “Eating Poetry” firmly locates the events as taking place in a recognizable reality. Although the events may be unlikely or improbably, they are so no bizarre as to exist outside reason such as the apple on the face of the man wearing the bowler in Magritte’s most famous painting. What happens here could happen here. Most likely it won’t, to be sure, but it could.
It is in that thin crack between could and wouldn’t that interpretation exists. When something that can never happen occurs, it is easy to define it in metaphorical terms. When something that can happen takes places, however, readers are usually encouraged to take it literally. So the question becomes: is the assault by the dogs and the evolutionary degradation of a human being into beast form intended as metaphor or a literal occurrence. Both are possible and neither can be rejected.
That crevice is also where the genius of the poem exists. Very few works of literature exist in which the narrative can be conceived entirely in literal terms or entirely in figurative terms or any possible combination of the two. While this creates utter ambiguity that limits any absolute interpretation, it also serves to expand the possibilities for interpretation to an almost infinite level.
