My Favourite Poems
Poems can often be more engaging and powerful than prose because of their heightened emotional impact, concise language, and natural musicality and rhythm. These qualities foster deeper reader involvement and multiple interpretations. Poetry frequently triggers a strong emotional response rather than relying on a detailed narrative to convey information.
Through vivid imagery, euphemism and symbolism, poetry can connect with universal human experiences such as love, loss and joy in ways that resonate deeply and sometimes more powerfully than a gradual accumulation of experience in prose. Poetry embodies Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s definition of poetry: “the best words in the best order,” distilling complex ideas and moments into fewer, carefully chosen words, each bearing significant weight.
This economy of language can make the message more striking and memorable, like a powerful “snapshot” rather than a prose’s “full-length movie.” Drawing from ancient oral traditions, poetry often uses metre, rhyme, and melodic sound patterns, giving it a musical quality that appeals to our natural sense of rhythm. This unique auditory characteristic of poems enhances the reading experience and aids memorisation, making the words more impactful.
So, it’s fitting to begin my collection with a poem by Billy Collins, the American poet, called: Introduction to Poetry.
Poem 001: Introduction to Poetry.
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a colour 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.
William James Collins (1941) served as the Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. He was a Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York, retiring in 2016.
Poem 002: Do You Have Any Advice For Those of Us Just Starting Out?
Give up sitting dutifully at your desk. Leave
your house or apartment. Go out into the world.
It's all right to carry a notebook but a cheap
one is best, with pages the colour of weak tea
and on the front a kitten or a spaceship.
Avoid any enclosed space where more than
three people are wearing turtlenecks. Beware
any snow-covered chalet with deer tracks
across the muffled tennis courts.
Not surprisingly, libraries are a good place to write.
And the perfect place in a library is near an aisle
where a child a year or two old is playing as his
mother browses the ranks of the dead.
Often he will pull books from the bottom shelf.
The title, the author’s name, the brooding photo
on the flap mean nothing. Red book on black, grey
book on brown, he builds a tower. And the higher
it gets, the wider he grins.
You who asked for advice, listen: When the tower
falls, be like that child. Laugh so loud everybody
in the world frowns and says, “Shhhh.”
Then start again.
Ronald Koertge (1940) is an American poet and author of young adult fiction. Koertge is the author of six poetry collections and the Poet Laureate of South Pasadena, California. He also has a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a California Arts Council grant.
