Guest Opinion: For Those Who Are Poetry-Shy

By Stephen Guy

Congratulations to Orcas Issues on the celebration of Orcas Island poets and poetry through the month of April. This showcase of island artistry will enjoy an avid readership among the many poetry devotees on the rock.

But I want to speak to the good people of Orcas who are not so inclined to put their feet under your banquet table of poems. The wit and humor in the following “Introduction to Poetry” offers a few good poetry reading tips from Billy Colllins.

I hope it makes the poems of April less off-putting for those of us who are a little poetry shy.

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.

So to take a clue or two from Billy Collins, I think he really means that we can just relax to approach a poem. We don’t have to go all Guantanamo on a poem to release its mystery of meaning. Rather, we are advised to let the poem tell us what it is presenting to us on its surface at first read.

What is the picture that it is drawing? Does anything immediately stand out as interesting or special? Then we are invited to listen to the music of a poem; to release our attention inside the poem to see where it wanders; and to shine some light to illuminate words or evocative phrases.

And if I may, I would offer a friendly amendment to Billy Collin’s suggestion to waterski across a poem. We would do better to kayak across the poem and see the beauty of the shore of poetry island.

Enough said here by me. I wish you all a creative poetry month.

Stephen Guy’s first journal excerpted poems were published as the Heartspeak collection in 2010. Subsequently, his poems have spilled ink onto the pages of  Guideposts, Appreciative Living ezine, and The Islands’ Sounder. Stephen continues to craft poems about nature, both inner and outer, on Orcas Island.