Blevins teaches writing courses at Roanoke College. In this essay, Blevins suggests that Gallagher's poem ultimately fails because Gallagher "does not sufficiently enhance her discursive statements with images and other figures of speech or with unexpected shifts in sentence type and syntax."

Poetry, like all forms of art, is so fully constructed out of a marriage between content and form that it is impossible to talk about a poem's subject without investigating its technique. Tess Gallagher's "I Stop Writing the Poem" explores the conflict between domestic labor and literary work in discursive lines that are completely free of im- ages and other figures of speech. While the poem's content is interesting because it is shyly ironic, suggesting that the domestic work that is the poem's central action is a woman's "true" work while simultaneously suggesting that a woman poet's writing is also important and "true," the poem...