For an ordinary person a poem is just a literary work written with the help of rhyme and rhythm. But how do the poets see it? With the help of irony, style and tone Billy Collins, Marilyn Nelson, Ruth Forman, Gary Snyder, Bob Hicok and William Carlos Williams try to acquaint the reader with their own vision of poetry, because for them it is more than an art of rhythmical composition.
In the poem Introduction to Poetry Billy Collins encourages the reader to treat every piece of poetry as a unique and precious thing. The poem is written in a didactic style and the author as a narrator offers different approaches to understanding of a poem. He compares it with a color slide, a hive, a maze, a room and a sea. Billy Collins teaches the reader how not just to “tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it” and simply read it, but try to explore it visually and auditory. (Collins 356) And here hides the irony – the pome Introduction to Poetry is full of visual and auditory and visual imagery itself.
William Carlos Williams also connects poetry with music. In his poem Poem he gives the definition of it – “It's all in the sound. A song”. (Williams 398) In order to support his idea the author creates a sound of his own poem and uses onomatopoeia that is hidden in the words “wasps” and “scissors”. In his opinion the poem should not be vague and ambiguous, but carry a “centrifugal” and “centripetal” meaning, be like “lady’s eyes”. This may be ironical, because after the first reading of Poem it seems to be a set of words that bear no concrete meaning.
Ruth Forman in her poem Poetry Should Ride the Bus somehow develops the thought of Billy Collins. The poetess in a very extraordinary way tries to say that poetry is everywhere in the world, but not everyone can see it. Forman uses personification and endows poetry with human features. It should “hopscotch in a polka dot dress”, “wear bright red lipstick”, “practice kisses”, “sing red revolution love song”, “smile” and so on. (Forman 403) Of course, all it has figurative meaning. The real sense is that poetry comprises a lot of topic and reveals various themes that can be read and liked by different kinds of people as well as Forman’s poem Poetry Should Ride the Bus. With her piece of poetry she gives an example to other writers. It is written in a playful manner and conventional tone that will understandable for every reader.
The poem How I Discovered Poetry by Marilyn Nelson is the next masterpiece that reveals the power of poetry. The narrator compares her first experience with it as “soul-kissing”. The tone of the poem changes through the whole text. The first line immediately introduces as sentimental and enthusiastic. The narrator is captured with poetry and ironically calls it Mount Parnassus. The repetition of the word “harder” creates a certain tension in the text and at the end the tone becomes serious, as it reveals the hidden moral of the poem – poetry is a strong weapon as it influences the hearts, minds and souls of people. it is noticeable that How I Discovered Poetry touches the issue of racial discrimination, as the narrator being the only black in the “white class” often heard “darkies, pickaninnies, disses and dats” in her direction. (Nelson 378) But the poetry helped the little girl to put her classmates in their places so they “walked silent to the buses, awed by the power of words”. (Nelson 378)
Unlike the previous poem, Making it in Poetry by Bob Hicok is of humorous tone. First of all, the title of the poem is very ironical. The phrase “Making it in” is usually connected with success and wealth, but the text of the poem states the opposite. The teller at the credit union asks the narrator why he has many small checks from universities and why he have not heard of him and the only ironical answer he gets: “Because I write poems”. (Hicok 438) The author reveals the reverse side of poetry – no money and no popularity. It happened so that poets are not as appreciated and read by people as prose writers. But all in all, the poem is very comic and entertaining.
The next writer Gary Snyder also shares with the reader his experience being a poet. In his short poem How Poetry Comes to Me he tells what he feel while writing new verses. He compares the poetry with the wild animal that “comes blundering over the /Boulders at night”. (Snider 421) It means that creating a new poem is not an easy task and every poet should know how to curb the flow of thoughts, how to domesticate the wild animal that “stays /Frightened outside the /Range of my campfire”. (Snyder 421) The only two rhyming words in the poem are “night” and “light’ that hints on the fact that inspiration comes to the writer usually at night and only in the morning he may finish his masterpiece.
Works Cited
Collins, Billy. “Introduction to Poetry”. Poetry. Ed. Michael Meyer. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2013. Print.
Forman, Ruth. “Poetry Should Ride the Bus”. Poetry. Ed. Michael Meyer. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2013. Print.
Hicok, Bob. “Making it in Poetry”. Poetry. Ed. Michael Meyer. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2013. Print.
Nelson, Marilyn. “How I Discovered Poetry”. Poetry. Ed. Michael Meyer. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2013. Print.
Snyder, Gary. “How Poetry Comes to Me”. Poetry. Ed. Michael Meyer. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2013. Print.
Williams, William C. “Poem”. Poetry. Ed. Michael Meyer. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2013. Print.
