A Study Guide for Colleen McElroy's "A Pied"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Colleen McElroy's "A Pied," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Aug 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535817011

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A Pièd

Colleen J. McElroy

1990

Introduction

A Pièd, from the French phrase to travel by foot, is one of a series of shoe poems Colleen McElroy published in 1990 in her collection What Madness Brought Me Here: New and Selected Poems, 1968-1988. Because of her self-described triangular, three-quarter feet.…a B width at the front and AA at the back, the poet explains, her feet won’t fit the forms of a factory-built last, and shoe manufacturers are not interested in nonstandard feet. Therefore, shoes were, for me, quite political. McElroy writes in her essay When the Shoe Fits: Myth in the Modern Mode that it is only natural that my poems, usually addressing subjects outside of the mainstream anyway, should take on shoes. A Pièd begins when the poet spots a single shoe on a highway in northern California, a lone shoe in six lanes of traffic with cars veering way from it. This curious and disturbing sight causes the poet explore a series of questions throughout the poem, wondering how the shoe got there: Was it through horrifying accident? Was it simple abandonment? In a series of loosely related images and similes, McElroy takes the reader on a journey from the simple object found in a road to larger questions of loneliness, uncertainty, and