My thoughts on “Introduction to Poetry”
I read the poem “Introduction to Poetry” by BIlly Collins and I want to do a line by line analysis on it. Surprisingly that is literally the reason I had to make this post because of how interesting I found it, you could call it my exigence. Hopefully, I show you omething new about the poem.
Firstly, overall I find this poem to have a very disappointed tone overall. It’s almost like a teacher looking at his students as they do something completely different from what he told them. It gives the feeling that it has happened so many times that in fact it forced him to write a poem about it to relieve his frustration.
At the beginning of his poem he starts by saying how he “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’m assuming that them means his students. I can also take from this line that he treats the poem like a color slide, made to admire the full spectrum of and not to focus specifically on just one color or a beehive which can be admired and not picked into, since when you go into the beehive bad things happen, like getting stung.
Next he talks about “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”. The dropping of the mouse into the poem kind of tells me how the mouse really doesn’t know where he is going or where he is. This is further reinforced by the “feel the walls for a light switch” since when I and probably the majority of people do when they go into a dark room and look for a light switch, is just mindlessly moving my arms across the walls hoping to feel the switch. I’m not really sure where it is but I know I have to find it. This could show how his students are very confused when reading poems and are just mindlessly reading the poem desperately trying to find meaning from the poem.
The line after that says, “I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author’s name on the shore”. The part about water skiing across the poem kind of tells me that the poem should be admired and looked at a whole because when I personally water ski, sometimes I completely forget that my family is on the ground in a fixed position and I’m constantly moving. I’m going miles and miles away from them because I’m going across the whole ocean for fun, and not just one part of it. He talks about “them” again and how he wants them to do a specific thing.
But in the next paragraph he talks about how they do something completely opposite to what he wanted. Going back to the student’s idea I had. “But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with a rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means”. Instead of letting the poem be free and inspiring them, they instead tie it down to a chair. The chair to me could mean the constructs of the student’s mind, the student might be trapped by his own thoughts trying to force the poem to give him something he can use for an assignment or something like that. Torturing a confession out of the poem, like writing and annotating every part of the poem hoping to find something in each annotation. The beating with the hose could be the pencil and how they keep writing on the poem and trying to find meaning, as if the meaning of the poem would show itself to them if they kept putting their own words on it.
I really enjoyed the poem because it really just gave me a whole image of a teacher trying desperately to teach his students how to appreciate a poem and probably have a fun conversation from it, but they don’t enjoy the poem and just try and get information out of it to regurgitate back onto the teacher.
