Introduction to Poetry and The Effort
These poems are rather "schoolish". In July there was a touch of "Autumn back to schoolness" in the air because God was treating Kansas to some cool summer weather. I had to check the calendar to make sure it was really July! August has been feeling like summer, so now I'm really looking to Autumn again... which for many means back to school, though some public schools start in the heat of August. Crazy!
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. Billy Collins
The Effort
Would anyone care to join me in flicking a few pebbles in the direction of teachers who are fond of asking the question:
"What is the poet trying to say?"
as if Thomas Hardy and Emily Dickinson had struggled but ultimately failed in their efforts—inarticulate wretches that they were, biting their pens and staring out the window for a clue.
Yes, it seems that Whitman, Amy Lowell and the rest could only try and fail but we in Mrs. Parker's third-period English class here at Springfield High will succeed with the help of these study questions in saying what the poor poet could not, and we will get all this done before that orgy of egg salad and tuna fish known as lunch.
Tonight, however, I am the one trying to say what it is this absence means, the two of us sleeping and waking under different roofs.
The image of this vase of cut flowers, not from our garden, is no help.
And the same goes for the single plate, the solitary lamp, and the weather that presses its face against these new windows-- the drizzle and the morning frost. So I will leave it up to Mrs. Parker, who is tapping a piece of chalk against the blackboard, and her students—a few with their hands up, others slouching with their caps on backwards— to figure out what it is I am trying to say about this place where I find myself and to do it before the noon bell rings and that whirlwind of meatloaf is unleashed.
Billy Collins (gleaned from The Writer's Almanac by Garrison Keillor and heard on NPR)
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. Billy Collins
The Effort
Would anyone care to join me in flicking a few pebbles in the direction of teachers who are fond of asking the question:
"What is the poet trying to say?"
as if Thomas Hardy and Emily Dickinson had struggled but ultimately failed in their efforts—inarticulate wretches that they were, biting their pens and staring out the window for a clue.
Yes, it seems that Whitman, Amy Lowell and the rest could only try and fail but we in Mrs. Parker's third-period English class here at Springfield High will succeed with the help of these study questions in saying what the poor poet could not, and we will get all this done before that orgy of egg salad and tuna fish known as lunch.
Tonight, however, I am the one trying to say what it is this absence means, the two of us sleeping and waking under different roofs.
The image of this vase of cut flowers, not from our garden, is no help.
And the same goes for the single plate, the solitary lamp, and the weather that presses its face against these new windows-- the drizzle and the morning frost. So I will leave it up to Mrs. Parker, who is tapping a piece of chalk against the blackboard, and her students—a few with their hands up, others slouching with their caps on backwards— to figure out what it is I am trying to say about this place where I find myself and to do it before the noon bell rings and that whirlwind of meatloaf is unleashed.
Billy Collins (gleaned from The Writer's Almanac by Garrison Keillor and heard on NPR)
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