Blog #1

          For our first poem, we read Billy Collins' "Introduction to Poetry." The speaker in the poem wishes for his students to interact with a poem, to "press an ear against its hive" to touch and hear its vibrancy and animation, to "drop a mouse into a poem" to explore its complexity and structure, and to "waterski across the surface of a poem" to, most importantly, enjoy a poem for its style, language, and other techniques that provide a thrill to the imagination. He wants his students to have a sensuous experience, not to aggresively search for message of a poem and ignore the important details of the work
         When understanding the speaker's message, I hesitated before concluding that I had finished working on this poem. I believe Collins wrote his message in a poem in order to have readers understand his message to avoid the irony of reading "Introduction to Poetry" to simply search for its meaning and ignore the rest of its contents.