Sign inventory 1, Week 4

The Trouble with Poetry by Bill 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.

-Begins with the subject, then gives us some imagery.
-Completely leaves audience in the wind in the first stanza.
-Imagery in the first stanza has a feeling of isolation, reinforced by the 'cold sand'
-'Cold sand' contrasts with the setting IE; a beach in Fl
-Very descriptive second stanza, poet tells the audience the trouble with words and several descriptions.
-Animal imagery used to explain human behavior in the second stanza
-third and forth stanza parallel each other, the first telling the action and the second describing it.
-fifth stanza exhibits contrary imagrey with the feather and the chain, joy and sorrow.
-end with an image of the Muse or the Spark that generates all verse.