Strand wrote "Eating Poetry" sometime during the mid- to late-1960s and published it in his 1968 collection Reasons for Moving. The setting for this poem is indeterminate, for we know only that the narrative takes place in a library, but we don't know in what city, state, or country, and there is no time period mentioned. Strand spent 1965 and 1966 as a Fulbright lecturer in Rio de Janeiro and returned to the United States afterwards to teach at MountHolyoke College in Massachusetts in 1967. These two positions may not have had any bearing on the poems in Reasons for Moving, but the significance may lie in the amount of traveling the poet had already done and in his continuing to move about throughout his career.

The lack of a permanent or semi-permanent home during childhood and adolescence possibly contributed to Strand's tendency to write poems with "neutral" settings...