Rather Poetic

Every now and then we get a comment on one of our posts that we want to make sure everyone sees.  This past Thursday, when we published Measuring the Text Complexity of Poems, Collette Marie Bennett (fellow blogger at Used Books in Class) shared this response with us:

I think being driven by the Common Core to measure poetry text complexity is as ridiculous as the poet Billy Collins suggested below in his poem “Introduction To Poetry”

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.

Billy Collins

Poetry should not be subjected to this attempt to classify and label its complexity through rubrics and charts. It would be easier to capture lightning in a bottle.

What we love about Collette’s response is that it is an  insightful text-to-text connection that illustrates the ways informational text lends understanding to other texts and makes us all think.  Does it get more Common Core than that?