tomorrow marks a new semester! have a poem.

[lotesse]

Introduction to Poetry
by 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.

Comments

[theprimrosepath]

How serrendipitously appropriate - this poem is in the front of my anthology for next semester's class. :) What are you taking/teaching, come tomorrow's semester?

[lotesse]

Lovely!

I get to go back to the 19th century this semester - George Eliot ahoy! - but alas am still teaching bloody freshman comp. What about you?

[theprimrosepath]

Yay, 19th century! I got so lucky with my 19th century survey course, my frist semester; it was taught by the head of the women's studies department, and was thus an entirely different reading list and perspective that I would otherwise have gotten.

Last semester was freshman comp; this semester, I'm moving on to - wait for it.... - freshman literature! Fiction, plays, and poetry - ohh, am I looking forward to poetry. :D

[lotesse]

Oh, I envy you! I like teaching lit soooo much better than comp!