Jazlene Harper

English

24 January, 05:28

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. 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. I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author's name on the shore. 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. What would a dramatic constructionist critic focus on when interpreting this poem? the extent to which the poem achieves its intended objective the frustration that Billy Collins must feel the main lesson or instruction of the poem the literary elements and qualities in the poem