This is the first poem in the book, poetry 180: A turning back to poetry by Billy Collins.
Repeated from the first poem on the reviewed website Poetry 180: A poem a day for American high schools, this poem introduces the book with Billy Collins' personal poetry. I am curious to see how much overlap the book and the website share.
Introduction to Poetry
Related Poem Content Details
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.
This is such an awesome poem. It is a perfect critique on literary analysis, or anti-literary analysis.
ReplyDeleteIt identifies the means, the senses, that we should use to explore and enjoy literature. I might stick this poem on my iPad to remind how to read poetry if I'm in a hurry or too tired
Yes! Just marvelous. Billy Collins is so easy to read. I'm not sure if I mentioned this when we first started reading Poetry 180, but one of my personal training clients in Boise had given me a Collins poetry book (Sailing Alone Around the Room) upon my departure to Hawaii. This was my first meeting with him in literary form and it was fun that he was the proponent of the 180 movement for high schools. So easy to read, yet the descriptions really stay with you.
ReplyDeleteIt is cool to flip these prompts from the reader back to the writer. One must read with the same senses that he writes? A flipped narration! Is this what you meant by anti-literary analysis?
A lot of times, literary analysis feels like torturing the text. Torture is abusing someone until they tell you what you want to hear. Torturers wouldn't accept the truth, unless it told them what they wanted. Readers too. We beat the text with a hose looking for what we want instead of searching, feeling, and enjoying it for what it has to offer.
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