Bill Collins is an American poet born on March 22, 1941. He is a Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York and was the appointed Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. He currently works as a teacher in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton.
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 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.
Analysis:
This poem expresses a teacher's feelings about teaching his students about poetry. He trys to get his students to look at the poem as an abstract piece of art. He emphasis this by using abstract language and similar sentence structure. For example he uses a simile to compare a poem to a "color slide." By doing this he shows that poems are not straight forward; they are complex and abstract. He starts three stanzas with I and a verb, telling the reader what he wants for his students. Towards the end of the poem it becomes clear that his students are not doing what he wants. They are treating poems like a math problem; looking for a single concrete answer. They are abusing the art form, "beating it with a horse", by trying to find one exact meaning to a poem, "torturing a confession out of it." The speaker is obviously not pleased with his student's approach to poetry. It is actually very ironic that I am writing an analysis on this poem because I am writing about what the poem says and the poem is about how poetry does not just have one concrete meaning.
This poem expresses a teacher's feelings about teaching his students about poetry. He trys to get his students to look at the poem as an abstract piece of art. He emphasis this by using abstract language and similar sentence structure. For example he uses a simile to compare a poem to a "color slide." By doing this he shows that poems are not straight forward; they are complex and abstract. He starts three stanzas with I and a verb, telling the reader what he wants for his students. Towards the end of the poem it becomes clear that his students are not doing what he wants. They are treating poems like a math problem; looking for a single concrete answer. They are abusing the art form, "beating it with a horse", by trying to find one exact meaning to a poem, "torturing a confession out of it." The speaker is obviously not pleased with his student's approach to poetry. It is actually very ironic that I am writing an analysis on this poem because I am writing about what the poem says and the poem is about how poetry does not just have one concrete meaning.
I like this poem because it applies directly to me as a student studying poetry. I make me look at how I see poetry and how I can improve my analysis of it. I far too often look for the singular meaning to a poem. This singular message does not exist. I need to broaden how I analyze poetry.
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