An Intro or Lecture to Poetry...?

 

pic cred: http://thebandwifeblog.com/2013/03/09/painted-books-diy/

Introduction to Poetry
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 its way out,

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

I want them to water-ski
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.



1. When I first started reading the poem, I thought it had a light feeling to it. However, as I kept reading it takes a dark twist at the end and the light feeling I had while reading it at the beginning faded away.

2. As I read the title, I thought it was going to be a poem about a lecture about poetry. I assumed it was an introductory lecture to college or high school students.

3. This poem is about a teacher trying to get his students to find a love for poetry. He wants them to look at the poem almost as if it is a person and to figure out its personality. The teacher's love for poetry is obvious and he wants the students to feel the same, however, the students have a hard time doing that. They look at the poem as if it is an object, not a person.

4. I had to look up more about the author so I could understand the poem more from where they were coming from. I found out that Billy Collins is in fact a renowned poet and a teacher himself. Knowing that he is a teacher, I can see where he got his perspective for writing this poem.
Another thing I did not understand in the poem was the phrase "beating it with a hose".  I found an analysis online done by another student, and their take was that Collins was saying they would over-analyze the poem. In other words, they would beat it until it had no meaning anymore.

5. In this poem, Collins uses to references: I and they. "I" is the teacher, perhaps Collins himself. "They" are the students of the teacher.

6. I think this poem matters in lots of different ways. I think Collins is trying to show how the art of poetry is lost or is starting to become lost. The students are almost trained to over-analyze things and do not know how to look for a deeper meaning.

7. This poem is relatively short, 7 stanzas long and at the most containing 3 lines per stanza. I think it is so short because Collins wants his message to be very impactful. Keeping it short helps the reader to remember more clearly what he has written.

8. I noticed that the poem is pretty erratic. The stanza length varies as does the flow of the poem. There is no apparent rhyme scheme. This poem does not really follow conventional norms of poetry. I think it is a way for Collins to show that poetry can vary in range and type.