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.

What I Believe about "I Believe"

Photo cred: Penn State University

Ars Poetica #100: I Believe by Elizabeth Alexander

Poetry, I tell my students,

is idiosyncratic. Poetry

is where we are ourselves

(though Sterling Brown said

“Every ‘I’ is a dramatic ‘I’”),

digging in the clam flats

for the shell that snaps,

emptying the proverbial pocketbook.

Poetry is what you find

in the dirt in the corner,

overhear on the bus, God

in the details, the only way

to get from here to there.

Poetry (and now my voice is rising)

is not all love, love, love,

and I’m sorry the dog died.

Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)

is the human voice,

and are we not of interest to each other?

Poetry, Poetry, Wherefore Art Thou Poetry?

Source

"Poetry Makes Nothing Happen"?
By: Julia Alvarez

Listening to a poem on the radio,
Mike Holmquist stayed awake on his drive home
from Laramie on Interstate 80,
tapping his hand to the beat of some lines
by Longfellow, while overcome by grief
one lonesome night when the bathroom cabinet
still held her husband's meds, May Quinn reached out
for a book by Yeats instead and fell asleep
cradling "When You Are Old," not the poet's best,
but still ... poetry made nothing happen,

which was good, given what May had in mind.
Writing a paper on a Bishop poem,
Jenny Klein missed her ride but arrived home
to the cancer news in a better frame of mind.
While troops dropped down into Afghanistan
in the living room, Naomi Stella clapped
to the nursery rhyme her father had turned on,
All the king's horses and all the king's men ...
If only poetry had made nothing happen!
If only the president had listened to Auden!

Faith Chaney, Lulu Perez, Sunghee Chen --
there's a list as long as an epic poem
of folks who'll swear a poem has never done
a thing for them ... except ... perhaps adjust
the sunset view one cloudy afternoon,
which made them see themselves or see the world
in a different light -- degrees of change so small
only a poem registers them at all.
That's why they can be trusted, why poems might
still save us from what happens in the world.