Arriving uptown last night fifteen minutes early for a rehearsal with my jazz septet, I popped into the neighboring Barnes & Noble to waste time wandering the piles of books. Thumbing a few in the “New Releases: Poetry” section, I was suddenly and intensely reminded that I love poems, that I have since at least kindergarden, and yet have somehow fallen almost completely away from reading them.

With a bit of reflection, I was unhappy to realize the reason: over-education. Too much time deconstructing poems, picking apart the nuances of their language in an attempt to second guess the writer’s intentions and unintentions, had almost entirely robbed poetry of the joy of pure and simple reading. So, to remedy that, I’ll be falling back on the suggestion of Poet Laureate Billy Collins: reading a poem a day. Not analyzing and discussing. Not “unpacking”. Just reading. Reading and enjoying.

Don’t worry; I won’t be subjecting you all to those daily poetry choices. (Not most of the time, anyway.) But, on the off chance that some of you might similarly be inspired to rediscover a lost love of the form, here’s one to kick things off, by Laureate Collins himself, that sums up rather perfectly the bind poetry finds itself in today.

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.