[lit-ideas] 180 days of poetry

From: "John McCreery" <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Sat, 24 Feb 2007 23:24:48 +0900

As I was browsing the website for Visual Thesaurus, I stumbled across

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.



from The Apple that Astonished Paris, 1996
University of Arkansas Press, Fayetteville, Ark.

This is the first poem in Poetry 180, A Poem A Day for American High
Schools, a program put together by the Library of Congress. Read all
about it...and read some more poems at
http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/001.html


--
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
http://www.wordworks.jp/
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[lit-ideas] 180 days of poetry

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