Hello and welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Wednesday, August 23, 2003.

Today's poem is by Billy Collins, and it's called Introduction to Poetry.

I'll read it once, offer a few comments, and then read it one more time.

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 water-ski

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.

Disclaimer, right out of the gate, I love this poem and I read it with students often.

However, I'm sometimes on the fence about Billy Collins, at least about Billy Collins.

At least about Billy Collins as a poet,

I once had the opportunity to ask the editor of poetry magazine.

I won't reveal which one to protect their identity from back backlash and reprisal.

But I once asked the then-editor of Poetry Magazine,

do you think Billy Collins is a real poet?

To which they replied, no comment in a way that made their actual sentiments pretty clear.

Whatever you think about Billy Collins, though, either as poet or as witty and observant writer of poetic prose, this is a fantastic and a helpful poem, I think.

Because he's absolutely right about the instinct of most students in particular to read poetry,

desperate to find out what it really means and suspicious that you have to do

...