Introduction to Poetry

1. How were you first introduced to poetry? What did you read, and how were you taught to read it? Did a teacher ever tell you to “waterski across a poem” or to “walk inside” a poem? How might you read poetry differently if they had? Do you enjoy poetry, or are you like the students in the poem, “torturing a confession” out of it? What ideas might you suggest to your past teachers to make reading poetry the playful and lighthearted experience it is in the poem?

2. Discuss the poem’s form. Why is it structured the way it is, with short stanzas ranging from 1-3 lines? Does the structure help or confuse your understanding of the poem’s meaning? If the stanzas are grouped by metaphor, why are the last two stanzas separated? Why do so many of the lines end with a noun? What is the effect of that choice?

3. Is the speaker really asking their students to “waterski” across a poem or to “hold it up to the light”? What does it mean to drop a mouse into a poem, or to put an ear up against it? Why are these particular metaphors chosen to represent the act of reading and understanding a poem? What other metaphors might you add?