Introduction to Poetry

I’ve only recently begun to read poetry, a strange confession for someone who graduated with honors in literature some thirty years ago. But then I haven’t read Moby Dick yet, either, nor Don Quixote, never mind the whole dizzy slew of postmodernists like Pynchon.

(I feel compelled to point out I’ve read plenty of difficult stuff and even partially understood some of it. But my list of things I haven’t read will always be longer than things I have.)

Reading poetry, I sometimes feel angry at the author.

“Why does it have to be so difficult? Why can’t you just say what you mean?” Some poems seem to mean something on a literal level which I can’t quite penetrate. Others seem intended to resist any kind of literal paraphrase.

I find, though, that I’m often drawn more to poems which are hard to understand. I can often say I like it, I just don’t know what it means. (My friend Broschat makes the same observation about films over on his Montlake blog.)

Here’s a poem I think I understand, but I like it anyway. It says something about how I try to read poetry.

Introduction to Poetry

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 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.

Billy Collins