Thoughts on tax day

April is National Poetry Month. One morning last week while I was folding laundry, I happened to turn on the radio and the poet Billy Collins was a guest on our local NPR station. How can you put a price on a program like that? But we do. And since today is April 15, I wonder if even one penny of this household's tax bill will help support the National Endowment of the Arts.

The New York Times calls Collins "the most popular poet in America." He's won countless awards and was the Poet Laureate of the U.S. from 2001-2003, but he also has a large following from appearing on Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion. Collins is a distinguished teacher. One of the things he spoke about on the radio was how most people can't live with ambiguity long enough to think through a complex problem, or for that matter read a poem. Our first reaction to art is often frustration, and we demand to know "what does it mean?"

Even so, Collins doesn't like poetry with intentional vagueness. Complex structure. Elevated diction. Obvious sentimentality. So when you take these gimmicks away, what makes a good poem? The best poets can move the reader from the everyday to the universal using plain language, imagery and metaphor.

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 water-ski
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 a rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Billy Collins