The Trouble With Poetry and Other Poems

by Billy Collins

The Trouble with Poetry 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.