Ketteler has taught literature and composition. In this essay, Ketteler discusses the way in which Rita Dove makes a comparison between geometry and poetic form.

The poem "Geometry," by Rita Dove, is a poem about ideas and space and the way in which ideas and space represent possibility and liberation. A mathematical science, the discipline of geometry revolves around precision and around measurements that add up to an organic whole to prove a scientific truth. The human mind has the capability to create such precision and order, to make sense of what would otherwise be chaos. By titling the poem "Geometry,"

Dove alerts the reader as to the subject of the poem. Unlike a "riddle poem" (such as Emily Dickinson's "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass"), this poem makes its metaphor explicit—in this case, the comparison of geometry and poetry. The reader then begins reading this...