We don't have to limit ourselves to poetry here, do we? Much of the stuff I read when writing papers finds its way into my poetry. For example, I'm writing a chapter for a volume on shame and death, and I'm exploring the mask as a kind of interface between shame and death. So for the paper I'm re-reading Freud's "The Uncanny" this morning, and he concludes that "the sense of the uncanny attaches . . . to the idea of being robbed of one's eyes." That's why Neil Gaiman's *Coraline* is so uncanny: the double mother has buttons sewn in for eyes, and she threatens the heroine with the same operation.

Has this fear of losing one's eyes --or fear of false eyes--ever surfaced in poems you've written? Or read?
March 1, 2008 1:11 PM