The Trouble with Poetry -Billy Collins

The trouble with poetry, I realized
as I walked along a beach one night—
cold Florida sand under my bare feet,
a show of stars in the sky—

the trouble with poetry is
that it encourages the writing of more poetry,
more guppies crowding the fish tank,
more baby rabbits
hopping out of their mothers into the dewy grass.

And how will it ever end?
unless the day finally arrives
when we have compared everything in the world

to everything else in the world,
and there is nothing left to do
but quietly close our notebooks
and sit with our hands folded on our desks.

Poetry fills me with joy
and I rise like a feather in the wind.
Poetry fills me with sorrow
and I sink like a chain flung from a bridge.

But mostly poetry fills me
with the urge to write poetry,
to sit in the dark and wait for a little flame
to appear at the tip of my pencil.

And along with that, the longing to steal,
to break into the poems of others
with a flashlight and a ski mask.

And what an unmerry band of thieves we are,
cut-purses, common shoplifters,
I thought to myself
as a cold wave swirled around my feet
and the lighthouse moved its megaphone over the sea,
which is an image I stole directly
from Lawrence Ferlinghetti—
to be perfectly honest for a moment—

the bicycling poet of San Francisco
whose little amusement park of a book
I carried in a side pocket of my uniform
up and down the treacherous halls of high school.

Vocabulary:
Dewy (Adjective): youthful and fresh; soft; wet.
Treacherous (Adjective): guilty of or involving betrayal or deception.

Analysis Questions:

Name the comparisons the poet makes between poetry and other things in lines 1–27. The repeated phrase “the trouble with poetry” is also the poem’s title.

Find details in lines 21–27 that further explain what the poet thinks the trouble with poetry is. Explain in detail.

Paying attention to the structure of a poem can help them read it with appropriate feeling and at an appropriate speed. Describe how you would read aloud lines 28–39.

Identify the lines containing details that describe the way the speaker uses the poems by Ferlinghetti. How did he use Ferlinghetti’s poetry? Be detailed in your response.

SHORT RESPONSE

Identify the subject of the poem as “The Trouble With Poetry.” In your own words, what does the poet believe that trouble to be, or what the effects of poetry are on him.

Identify parts of the poem that they find difficult to paraphrase.

Summarize the poem. Cite evidence from the text to support your summaries.