How to Read a Poem: Based on the Billy Collins Poem "Introduction to Poetry"

By Tania Runyan

How to read a poem. A lot of books want to teach you just that. How is this one different? Think of it less as an instructional book and more as an invitation.

For the reader new to poetry, this guide will open your senses to the combined craft and magic known as "poems". For the well versed, if you will, this book might make you fall in love again.

How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem "Introduction to Poetry")—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Excellent teaching tool. Anthology included.

• Language: English
• Publisher: T.S. Poetry Press
• Release date: Feb 25, 2015
• ISBN: 9781943120000

Tania Runyan

Tania Runyan is the author of the poetry collections Second Sky, A Thousand Vessels, Simple Weight, and Delicious Air, which was awarded Book of the Year by the Conference on Christianity and Literature in 2007. Her book How to Read a Poem, an instructional guide based on Billy Collins’s “Introduction to Poetry,” was released in 2014. A companion volume, How to Write a Poem, is now available. When not writing, Tania tutors high school students, plays fiddle and mandolin, and gets lost in her Midwestern garden.

Book preview

Introduction

How to read a poem. A lot of books want to teach you just that. How is this one different?

Think of it less as an instructional book and more as an invitation. For the reader new to poetry, this guide will open your senses to the combined craft and magic known as poems. For the well versed, if you will, this book might make you fall in love again.

For many of us, poetry is difficult and unapproachable. Or perhaps we manage well enough, but it feels like so much work—another academic exercise to check off our lists.

If poetry requires that much effort, it certainly doesn’t feel like something to enjoy, something to curl up with by the fire (or pool).

Whatever your story, I’m going to try to trick you into becoming a better reader of poetry by having fun.

In this book, you will not answer comprehension questions or discuss literary terms directly. Rather, the focus will be to engage you with the poem. Sure, you will become intimately entwined with alliteration, enjambment, and metaphor, but for now, defining and memorizing terms is not important. We’re not going on a scavenger hunt for literary devices.

We’re first and foremost taking a journey to deepen your relationship with poems. This is not about finding answers, decoding lines, or being smart. It’s about paying attention to poems. And poems paying attention to you.

You’re invited on a journey. Will you RSVP yes?

The Reading Soul

Poetry, I have a confession to make. I’m a poet, with two degrees and many editorial positions to my credit, but I don’t always want to spend time with you. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, who wave their hands wildly for my attention, you sit in the corner of the garden like that quiet, intricate columbine by the bench.

Come and read me. Not as an editor working through a stack of review copies, but as you, a reading soul. There is so much to talk about. Please, just shut up and take a seat.

I grab my coffee and flip open my iPad®. Just one more BuzzFeed article, Poetry. Then I’ll read you.

I know I’ve complained that you’re too much work, but it’s a dumb excuse. Life without you is too much work—trying to make meaning among all the empty words distracting me from, as Mary Oliver calls it, my one wild and precious life.

So teach me how to spend time with you again. Let’s rekindle the passion I had before I became a poetry professional, before I knew any better.

Maybe Billy Collins can help.

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, from The Apple That Astonished Paris

Without beating Collins’s well-known poem to death (wouldn’t that be ironic?), I’m going to use it as a field guide for my own reading. Join me as I walk through several poems’ rooms, flip some light switches to see better how to live my wild life, and tell about it.

1

Hold It to the Light: Imagery

Billy Collins’s Introduction to Poetry challenges us not to analyze a poem, but to enter it, live with it, and make it a part of us.

In this chapter, I’m going to explore how Collins’s first stanza can help us fall in love with poetry’s dazzler: imagery.

I ask them to take a poem

and hold it up to the light

like a color slide

Collins tells us to hold the poem up to the light. A younger reader may ask how exactly one can hold a large piece of playground equipment up to the sun, but the slide in this stanza is supposed to make us think of images. In the ancient days before digital cameras and PowerPoint®, people turned their photo negatives into slides to

Reviews for How to Read a Poem

[cheryl.russell · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I use this book in my Introduction to Creative Writing class. A lot of information in a very small volume and I can easily justify the cost to students.