eating cucumbers without permission...

Reading literary theory is fun, but I try and keep this piece by Billy Collins in mind.

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.

It’d have been useful to hear it in highschool, I think, before discovering what all those poems were “Really About” — Hypocrisy, The Poet’s Grief At His Wife’s Passing, The Plight Of The Working Class In A Certain Town At The Turn Of The Century; specific meanings carefully elucidated by sufficiently invasive interrogation, by surgical insertion of salient socio-historio-biographical fact. Feh. Is it any wonder I never enjoyed it until I discovered it on my own?