#174 How to Read Poetry

I haven't the faintest idea where I originally got this from.  I found it in an old file.  Don't know where it lived before that.  But I hope that including the author's name, and saying that I love it, will buy me legal  absolution.

Introduction to Poetry    Billy Collins

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.