Two for your Monday!

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.

 

Billy Collins, “Introduction to Poetry” from The Apple that Astonished Paris. Copyright � 1988, 1996 by Billy Collins. Reprinted with the permission of the University of Arkansas Press. Source: The Apple that Astonished Paris ( University of Arkansas Press, 1996 ) Believe, Believe By Bob Kaufman Believe in this. Young apple seeds, In blue skies, radiating young breast, Not in blue-suited insects, Infesting society’s garments.   Believe in the swinging sounds of jazz, Tearing the night into intricate shreds, Putting it back together again, In cool logical patterns, Not in the sick controllers, Who created only the Bomb.   Let the voices of dead poets Ring louder in your ears Than the screechings mouthed In mildewed editorials. Listen to the music of centuries, Rising above the mushroom time. Bob Kaufman, “Believe, Believe” from Cranial Guitar. Copyright © 1996 by Eileen Kaufman. Reprinted by permission of Coffee House Press. www.coffeehousepress.org Source: Cranial Guitar ( Coffee House Press, 1996 ) Both poems from the Poetry Foundation