Every once in a while, you teach a text and everything is perfect. It’s the perfect blend of the text, the class make-up, and the lesson. This week, I had that moment with Billy Collins’ “Introduction Poetry,” so I wanted to share it with you!
For context, my school is on a modified block schedule. This means we have 48-minute classes 3 times a week, but once a week we meet for an hour and a half. On block days, we step away from our regular unit and do some other things, including a voice lesson, literary term bellringer, multiple choice prep, independent reading, and a poem study. (Obviously we don’t do all of these, usually just a few.)
For the past few weeks we haven’t had time to do a poem lesson, so this was only our second poem lesson of the year. I’ll try to break down how I approached the lesson and my thought process behind it.
Meet the Poet: Billy Collins
For our poem lessons, I’ve decided to approach each poem by meeting the poet. So before we even read the poem, I shared Billy Collins’ poet biography from Poetry Foundation. I shared this snippet:
This bio explains so well why I love Collins’ poems. He can describe a feeling that is universal in ways that are strange but relatable. This is the aspect of the poem that I wanted to enhance and highlight in this lesson.
“Dubbed “the most popular poet in America” by Bruce Weber in the New York Times, Billy Collins is famous for conversational, witty poems that welcome readers with humor but often slip into quirky, tender, or profound observation on the everyday, reading and writing, and poetry itself.”
His Specialty: Witty Takes on Relatable Issues
To highlight Collins’ unique takes on relatable issues, I gave my students a task before they got “Introduction to Poetry.” I handed out notecards and asked two questions:
- How do you feel when you are reading a text or tackling a problem and you just can’t get it?
- How do you feel when you are reading a text or tackling a problem and you understand it absolutely?
To answer their questions, they had to make an analogy, beginning with “It feels like…” Students spent a few minutes answering on their own and sharing with a neighbor, then they gave the cards to me. I responded too! I shared their answers and here were some of my favorites:
How do you feel when you are reading a text or tackling a problem and you just can’t get it?
- It feels like I’m back in third grade talking to my neighbor that’s 17 and trying to understand what she means.
- It’s like my brain is melting and I am trying to hold its shape as it slips through my fingers.
- It’s like the processors in my brain overheated and caught fire. And it sounds like the screech of brakes of a car is filling my head and I can’t think.
- It feels like I’m putting in a password I think is right only to be denied time and time again.
- It feels like when you want to lay down so bad, but when you lay down you realize you have things to do so you stand back up.
- It’s like I’m on the outside of an inside joke everyone else around me understands it and finds funny that I don’t.
How do you feel when you are reading a text or tackling a problem and you understand it absolutely?
- It feels like fireworks going off, each with new possible ideas bursting in my mind.
- It feels like seeing the sun after days of thunderstorm and rain.
- It feels like knowing what someone is getting as a surprise—before they get it!
- I feel like the Albert Einstein of our day, like the Lord has blessed me with eternal earthly knowledge.
- It feels like I’ve climbed Mount Everest without dying.
When I read these aloud, my students loved it. There were some that just made them say, “Yes!” They definitely found that many other descriptions, while unusual, described this universal feeling. Now, we were ready for the poem.
The Poem: “Introduction to Poetry”
Even though I teach this poem every year, this is the first time it elicited laughter after reading it. I knew that our warm-up got students ready for Collins’ strange but witty descriptions and comparisons.
I asked students which descriptions from the first half of the poem felt most accurate to that feeling of truly studying poetry. I’ll try to transcribe what my students said.
- About “I want them to waterski / across the surface of a poem / waving at the author’s name on the shore” – I like this one because we wave at the poet, like we acknowledge him, but we don’t need to know his exact thoughts or “right answers” to water ski across it.
- Another student liked the same quote (see above), saying, “Water skiing takes skill. So does poetry analysis.”
- About “walk inside the poem’s room / and feel the walls for a light switch” – “This feels like a really good depiction of what studying a poem without context feels like. And you can give us the light, but we won’t have you during the exam, so we need to find the switch on our own.”
- About “press an ear against its hive” – “There’s a buzzing inside the poem, meaning there is more than one meaning or element. Just like there’s always hidden bees, we might not see them all, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still understand the poem.”
Application
We had some more conversation about what it means to tie the poem to a chair and why we beat it with a hose. Too often, students approach poems just to translate them, not understand them. Even more important than understanding a poem is applying the meaning of that poem to your own life and learning from it. While that meaning might differ slightly from someone else’s, they can coexist. We can still study the color slide or hear the hum of its hive.
For more poetry practice and additional no-prep poetry lessons, check out my TpT store, including my Poetry Growing Bundle. This resource includes every poem unit I create, with access to any future resources that I add for free!
