Billy Collins, apart from being one of my favorite poems, has created an amazing resource for students and teachers through his book poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry. As the editor of the book and selector of poems, he's chosen a poem for each 180 days of school. And just like apples, poems are great to ingest every day.
Collins explains how he got the idea when he visited a high school in Chicago for a whole-school Poetry Day. He was inspired by these students' and teachers' desire to incorporate more poetry into the life of their school. Not only can this school benefit from the enormous undertaking of this book, but now we all can as well.
The book begins with one of my favorite poems of all time, Billy Collin's own work, "Introduction to Poetry." This poem is about students who want to torture the meaning out of poems, trying desperately to figure out what the poet was trying to get at, when often we just need to allow a poem to play, to listen carefully to it or to sit in awe of it. Collins says, "I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author's name on the shore." I am able to connect so deeply to this poem mostly because of my love for poetry and my desire to pass that love along to my students. No one ever falls in love with something when it becomes such terrible drudgery as we often make poetry explication in schools.
Through the rest of the selections, Collins gives us an insight into the ordinary and not-so-ordinary times in life, exposing us to poets and poems we may never have read otherwise. What better recommendation for a poem than from the former U.S. Poet Laureate himself?
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