1-Read the poem aloud.
Reading the poem out loud led me to ask who the intended audience is. Is Billy Collins speaking to students or other analyzers of poetry? Or other poets? Or critics? The flow of the poem is nice. It's not complex or abstractly written. It seems straight forward in meaning and design.
2-Articulate your expectations, starting with the title.
The title gives me the sense that the author is going to explain poetry. Maybe that he will simplify it? The title hints that this poem may ease you into poetry. Perhaps it means that this poem will not be a crazy complicated mix of metaphors and feelings.
3-Read the syntax literally.
The reading suggests writing out the full sentences.
1.) I ask them (students, poets, critics?) to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against the hive.
2.) 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.
3.) I want them (students? critics?) to water-ski across the surface of a poem waving at the author's name on the shore.
4.) But all they (students/critics) want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it.
5.) They (students/critics) begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.
By replacing the ambiguous personal pronoun, they, with who I think the author is speaking to didn't seem to change a lot for me. The text also suggests rearranging the sentences so I tried reading them out of order. It did not change the meaning of the poem for me.
4-Consult reference work.
I actually looked up "beating with a hose" to see if I could find an explanation for the reference. It seems to me that beating some one with a rubber hose is quite brutal. In this case the poem is the one being tortured to death.
5-Figure out who, where, when, and what happens.
Who-the speaker could be the poet or a teacher; the audience could be students, fellow poets, or critics; there are no characters in the poem itself.
Where and when-Where is the speaker? I picture this poem at the beginning of a text book or one of the first lectures given by an English teacher. The setting of the poem is the receiver's mind.
6-Why does it matter? What does it all mean?
This poem is giving advice! It suggests using your senses when reading a poem. Most people jump directly to the analysis of the syntax and the form but Billy Collins is telling us to use our eyes, ears, and sense of touch to experience a poem. Water ski across the surface. Read it through and enjoy it. Stop beating the life out of poetry.
7- Consider how the poem's form contributes to its effect and meaning.
This poem is separated into different phrases to help the reader focus on one set of imagery at a time. Separated by the different sense used? There is no real rhyme scheme. There's lots of imagery. There doesn't seem to be any significance to the amount of syllables used in each line. The author does seem to be personifying poems in a way. Go inside a poem's room...hold it up...press an ear against it...water ski on it. Because the poet makes poetry a living thing, he plays on our humanity a bit by begging us not to harm or beat it to death.
8-Investigate and consider the ways the poem both uses and departs from poetic conventions-especially form and sub-genre.
This poem is written in free verse which really drives the point of the poem home. Poetry can be whatever it wants to be and should be experienced in all sorts of ways.
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