How to Read a Poem
I became
acquainted with the poems of Billy Collins during the last decade that I
taught. I wish it had been sooner. I’m sure we all know a poem so complex, so
loaded with symbols and allusions and extended metaphors that the only way to
understand it is, as Billy Collins says, to “tie it to a chair and torture a
confession out of it.” But read how
Billy Collins advises us to read (and teach!) a poem:
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 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.
--Billy Collins (from Sailing
Alone Around the Room)
So I say, I
wish I had read his advice earlier. Too often, in the classroom I treated poems
like prisoners or math problems one. Take
the poem “Another Sarah” by Anne Porter, another of my favorite poets. If you have grown up with the Bible as an essential
part of your life, then you will quickly realize that the title is the key to
the poem. If you know Sarah as the wife
Abraham, then you know all you need to know to understand, appreciate, and enjoy
the following poem. You might even, like
Sarah, chuckle a bit after reading it.
Another Sarah
When winter
was half over
God sent
three angels to the apple-tree
Who said to her
“Be glad,
you little rack
Of empty
sticks,
Because you
have been chosen.
In May you
will become
A wave of
living sweetness
A nation of
white petals
A dynasty of
apples.”
--Anne Porter
(from An Altogether Different Language)
In a couple
of days Chris Goedhart will come to prune my apple tree. I’m glad, I hope the tree is glad also and
produces a “dynasty of apples.” But in
this resurrection season I will also be reminded of Sarah’s (and Abraham’s)
seed and count myself a part of their dynasty.
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