Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Summer 2007

Publication Title

Michigan Quarterly Review

Volume

46

Issue

3

Abstract

I’m going there today. But I can’t find the right preposition to capture the experience. Will I go onto the prairie, as if it were the upper surface of something, a plane or a platform to pass over? Will I go into the prairie, as if it were something that can surround or envelop me like an economic recession or a waiting room? Will I go through the prairie, as if it were a substance like water or an ordeal like menopause to move into and beyond? Or will I go around the prairie, metaphorically skirting its edges, since it is an enigma whose meaning I’ve yet to discover?

And what of the articles a or the? Will I go to a prairie, a being a fragment of the once vast grassland in the center of North America, or will I go to the prairie, the whole from which the relict is preserved or somehow escaped destruction, a whole that still exists, even if only in the imagination? What I can say: I’m going there today.

Comments

© 2007 Lisa Knopp

Nine-Mile Prairie first appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review.
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=mqr;c=mqrarchive;page=home;xc=1;g=mqrg

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