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.
Billy Collins, “Introduction to Poetry” from The Apple that Astonished Paris. Copyright � 1988, 1996 by Billy Collins. Reprinted with the permission of the University of Arkansas Press.
Source: The Apple that Astonished Paris (1996)
I’m a huge fan of Billy Collins but I had not seen this poem before. Thank you for sharing it. I’m sure I’ve shared this before but his poem “Litany,” I believe, indirectly – and hilariously – makes a point similar to the one he’s making here. And he reads it with the dryness of the Sahara Desert: https://youtu.be/56Iq3PbSWZY
Thank you for sharing that – I enjoyed that clip very much! It is terribly funny the way he reads it, not to mention the lines of the poem itself. He certainly has a way with words and I do love his style. Glad we have yet another thing in common: our love of verse.