Billy Collins' "Introduction to Poetry" carries a message reflective of its era. In the mid-20th century, Bertolt Brecht championed what he called the distancing effect, deliberately blocking reader immersion and forcing more critical engagement with texts. (This was a considerable break from Romantic or Expressionist traditions.) Collins takes a similar approach, albeit in a didactic way, in this poem, contemplating the experiential reading of poetry. The reader is guided through Collins' metaphors for absorbing poems, which are alternately scientific and natural as discussed in class, but ultimately these are all metaphors of standing apart from an object. Whether holding a poem up to the light, dropping a mouse down into a poem, fumbling into its room or waterskiing across it, it defines a distinct separation between reader and text. The final turn comes in the last lines, when the distance at which the poem is held is forced through by clumsy readers and instructors. Forcing this more critical engagement changes the fundamental experience of reading poetry.
-Will
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