Graham wrote "Mind" in the late 1970s and it appears in her 1980 collection Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts. Like many of her poems, "Mind" is not set in any identifiable time or place. Rather, it is a meditation on an idea, the idea of mind. During the 1970s and 1980s, Graham was both a student and a professor in various departments of English, where post-structural literary theories were becoming a regular part of the curriculum. Post-structuralism refers to a set of approaches or attitudes towards texts rather than any codified body of knowledge, and is a response to structuralist theories of knowledge. Some of the features post-structuralist theories share include a rejection of ideas such as essentialism and foundationalism, which inform structuralism. Essentialism suggests there is a reality beyond language, unmediated by how human beings name the world and invest it with significance. Plato...