Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins: An Introduction to Poetry?

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Introduction to Poetry
By Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
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1. There is a tonal shift towards the end that really adds to the intended effect of the poem. What starts out really beautiful and lyrical in the beginning turns clunky and dark. 

2.. I have the expectation from the title that this poem will be like the first lecture in a series of lectures about poetry. However, the author starts off with very vivid imagery, taking the reader away from the typical lecture which immediately grabs my attention.

3. The author is explaining in this poem how he begins teaching poetry. He asks his students to look at the imagery and to treat the poem like it is alive. He asks the students to respect the poem as a complex, yet easy to navigate, work. He wants them to have fun with the poem, but instead, they treat it like some code that has to be broken before they can move on.

4. This poem is pretty straightforward, however, I had to look up what it meant to "beating it with a hose" meant. Turns out, it means a literal hose. Hose beating is a common way to torture people for information. It inflicts a lot of pain, but little bruising occurs. From Wikipedia, I also found this interesting tidbit: "In cryptography, rubber-hose cryptanalysis is a euphemism for the extraction of cryptographic secrets (e.g. the password to an encrypted file) from a person by coercion or torture—such as beating that person with a rubber hose, hence the name—in contrast to a mathematical or technical cryptanalytic attack." In other words, when code breakers have tried all means possible to crack a code, they will "cheat" and beat it out of a person. This just adds to the image Collins is trying to convey.

5. There are 2 who's in this work: I and they. It is assumed that "I" is Collins himself and "they" are his students. I am assuming this happens in a classroom. It is a story of a teacher being ignored by his students and missing the point of what he is trying to say. 

6. There are many reasons why I think this poem matters. I think that Collins may be making a statement about the current education system; where it is engrained in students brains that nothing is what it is and that they have to know the meaning of things in order to get anything out of it. I think it could also show how students are hardwired to get the "right" answer as soon as possible in order to know it for the impending test. I think Collins is trying to show that sometimes poetry is something to merely enjoyed and not endlessly dissected. 

7. 7 stanzas ranging from one line long to three. It is not a very long poem, but then again, Collins' message is one that doesn't need many words to convey. Each stanza contains a single image and no more, maybe to show how versatile and aesthetically pleasing a poem can be, not something that has to always be consistent. 

8. First off, there is no rhyme scheme. The stanza lengths vary, as does the meter. This may be Collins using this unique organization to show how poetry doesn't have to rhyme or follow any preconcieved formula in order to be poetry, it just has to have thought put into it.