How to Read a Poem

a free chapter from the popular book!

Poet Tania Runyan is the author of the popular poetry How-To-Trio. One of her wonderful books from the trio is How to Read a Poem: Based on the Billy Collins Poem “Introduction to Poetry”. The following is an excerpt from the book.

Chapter 1

Hold It to the Light: Imagery

Billy Collins’s “Introduction to Poetry” challenges us not to analyze a poem, but to enter it, live with it, and make it a part of us.

In this chapter, I’m going to explore how Collins’s first stanza can help us fall in love with poetry’s dazzler: imagery.

I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide

Collins tells us to hold the poem up to the light. A younger reader may ask how exactly one can hold a large piece of play- ground equipment up to the sun, but the slide in this stanza is supposed to make us think of images. In the ancient days before digital cameras and PowerPoint®, people turned their photo negatives into slides to create slide shows. My best sources (um, Wikipedia writers) describe a slide as “a specially mounted individual transparency intended for projection onto a screen using a slide projector.” Color slides are small, just 2×2 inches, and when people want to see the image without a projector, they must hold it to a light source, squint a bit, turn it to get a good look.

So how do you hold a poem up to the light?