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.
I have a lot of thoughts about this week's poem. I am filled with emotion at this point in the year, when there are only days left...hours...minutes. I imagine that I feel similar (albeit to a much lesser degree) to the way a parent sending a child off to college might feel: reflective over our time together, proud because they have come so far, and anxious about what the upcoming years might hold for them.
I plan to write another post about this tomorrow, but for now I'd just like to think that maybe my students are leaving me with a few new thoughts, a few new skills, and few new ideas about the world they live in. They may not yet be waterskiing across poems the way I hope they will one day be able to, but I know they have come a long way in the last two years we've spent together. They'll get there. It just might take a little while...
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