Introduction To Poetry in  General   

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.

By Billy Collins

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Other poems by Billy Collins:

• Candle Hat
• Child Development
• Consolation
• Dear Reader
• Dharma
• Directions
• Fishing On The Susquehanna In July
• Flames
• For Bartleby The Scrivener
• I Ask You
• I Go Back To The House For A Book
• Introduction To Poetry
• Invention
• Japan
• Madmen
• Man Listening To Disc
• Marginalia
• Neither Snow
• Nightclub
• Nostalgia
• On Turning Ten
• Picnic, Lightning
• Pinup
• Reading An Anthology Of Chinese Poems Of The Sung
• Shoveling Snow With Buddha
• Silence
• Snow Day
• Study In Orange And White
• The Art Of Drowning
• The Best Cigarette
• The First Dream
• The Iron Bridge
• The Only Day In Existence
• Today
• Walking Across The Atlantic