One amazing aspect of poetry is that every reader can have a different point of view on the meaning of a poem.  Different people can interpret a poem in many different ways and see meanings that the author didn't even think about when writing the poem. Even though the author may have meant for a specific message from the poem, a reader's thoughts are unique to the reader and not considered wrong.  By looking at "Introduction to Poetry", we can see imagery and point of view, which most readers don't see; this is important because it shows that the author and their interpretation are irrelevant to a poem, in poetry the actual content of a poem and the reader's understanding are vital.

An interesting thing about poetry is that there is no single meaning to a poem, there are tons and tons of different ways to interpret a poem.  One person might read a poem and have a completely different idea from another person reading the same poem. That is great, it opens up your mind when you discuss a poem and hear from other people what they got from it and how it differs from what you think.  In this poem, Collins writes as if he is a teacher talking to a class about poetry, trying to show them all of the different ways to look at a poem saying: "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." (Lines 1-4)  When he says that, he is trying to get students to look at the content of a poem and gather their thoughts about what it means from their own, unique point of view.  There is no set meaning for any poem.  Making the comparison of  "pressing an ear against its hive" to poetry is Collins saying that a poem has the complexity of a bee hive, there are many different tunnels and they come out at numerous endings in the hive; that is representing the abundant interpretations of any single poem.  The manner in which a poem is read in your head can even lead you down various different paths of thought that change along the way, just switching up the speed of the voice in your head can lead to something you never would've thought of.  Also, when he says to "hold it up to the light like a color slide" that is saying to look at it at a different angle, the reader must inspect the poem like a specimen on a slide every way they can.  The teacher point of view utilized in this poem fits extremely well since Collins is now actually teaching poetry workshops at Stony Brook University.  But, Collins then goes on to say that it may not be easy: "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." that all signifies how much depth there is to poetry and that you really have to look into the poem to see what it is all about.  The part about walking "in the poem's room and feel the walls for a light switch" suggests to me that getting meaning from a poem is like first entering a dark room, and not until the light switch is found is there  an  understanding of the poem. In other words, it takes work to find meaning in a poem, and you have to look all around the room on every wall to find the switch; even though a reader has "turned on the lights" they still do not automatically see every detail of the poem, their eyes are open but it takes adjustment and there are even more observations waiting to be discovered.

I would like to argue that you cannot read a poem and expect to know what it really means the first time through:  you have to read it multiple times.  I interpret the part of this poem with the mouse as saying that the search for meaning in a poem is like a mouse finding a way out of a maze.  It is not clear which path will get the mouse out of the maze and it is not clear when a reader will find meaning in a poem.  Look beyond the surface of a poem and really explore it even if you don't know where it's going to figure out what you get out of it.  Towards the end of the poem, Collins talks about the difficulty with students trying to find just the author's meaning and not what the poem means to each of them.   As if he is the teacher and he is going over a poem with his students he says: "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." (Lines 12-16)  Collins is definitely somewhat disappointed since he tried to get them to look at it in so many different ways.  The part about "beating the poem with a hose" shows just how hard it is for the students in the poem to understand Collins' point of teaching how to read the poetry.   When Collins says: "I want them to waterski/across the surface of a poem/waving at the author's name on the shore." (Lines 9-11) I think he is trying to get them to forget about the author, which he gets across by having them out on a lake waterskiing while the author's name is all the way on shore.  The author is kind of irrelevant to a reader while reading a poem and shouldn't be crossing the readers mind.  The reader should really jump in and analyze what is going on; waterskiing represents the reader getting in the water and surrounding themselves with the words and their meanings.  I would also like to argue that the reason the kids in this poem are like that is because that is how we are taught to analyze any written piece in school by a majority of teachers.  Kids are taught a specific formula for every kind of writing and that is to figure out what the author really means and what point he/she is trying to get across.  While that works pretty well for some things like a short story for example, it is not the case with poetry.  With poetry, the reader has to dig back beyond the layers and inspect the poem and from that get the meaning, at least what the reader  thinks the meaning is which is perfectly fine if it doesn't match up with other interpretations.

Billy Collins uses imagery and point of view in "Introduction to Poetry" to show that the author and their interpretation are extraneous, how a reader interprets a poem is up to them.  The poem does an excellent job explaining the problems of the reader during a poetry experience and also does all of that impressively in such a short, to the point technique.  Since Collins currently teaches a poetry workshop, this poem definitely relates to his experience in the classroom.  He is attempting to get his students to gather the meaning on their own from what they have read and not try to force what the author meant out of the poem.

