If you wish to attend the read around (t’s free, fun, a great way to share, and reading a poem is optional). Note: If you registered already, you do not need to register again, simply use the link sent to you in your confirmation email. Register Here:

Next Read-Around is 5/8/25 at 5:00 PM PST

How It Works:

  1. Read the poem 

  2. Do your own reflection on it, noting what it inspires in you

  3. Feel free to use your own reflection as your prompt or…

  4. Use the selection of prompts below

  5. Pick one that inspires you and write (feel free to use only one or write several poems using different prompts) or…

  6. Don’t use any of the provided prompts and follow your inspiration from wherever it comes

My Thoughts

One attribute of childhood that we often lose as adults is the ability to enter into an imagined world as if it is a 3-dimensional reality. The closest we come as adults is typically through art: movies, books, and, In Billy Collins case, a painting. Collins ekphrastic poem, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, was inspired by one of Frederic Edwin Church’s many views of the Hudson River. Collins steps over the velvet rope, enters the scene, and roams the landscape as if he were indigenous to the place, walking along the Palisades, and filling in details from an insider’s point of view.  The power of imagination can take us beyond what is given, allow us to see things from various points of view. Collins has at least three poinsts of view in the poem: first as the onlooker gazing at the poem from behind the velvet rope; second as the insider that steps over the rope into the scene, and 3rd as an outsider observing another viewer behind the velvet rope that sees the Billy Collins inside the painting moving and is then hauled away with apparent madness. The poem plays the magic trick of appearance and disappearance at each level: The intial Collins disappears into the painting; the new observer disappears into madness; and finally, the poem ends with the inside Collins stepping toward the vanishing point. Collins manages to capture the allure and danger of letting our imagination run a way with us into other words, in which we may actually, for better or worse,  lose ourselves and leaves us with an implied questions:  which is better—the real or the imagined?

The Brooklyn Museum of Art

I will now step over the soft velvet rope
and walk directly into this massive Hudson river
painting, and pick my way along the Palisades
with the stick I snapped off a dead tree.

I will skirt the smoky, nestled towns
and seek the path that leads always outward
until I become lost, without a hope
of ever finding the way back to the museum.

I will stand on the bluffs in nineteenth-century
clothes, a dwarf among rock, hills, and flowing water,
and I will fish from the banks in a straw hat,
which will feel like a brushstroke on my head.

And I will hide in the green covers of forest,
so no appreciator of Frederick Edwin Church,
leaning over the soft velvet rope,
will spot my tiny figure moving in the stillness
and cry out, pointing for others to see,

and be thought mad and led away to a cell
where there is no vaulting landscape to explore,
none of this bird song that halts me in my tracks,
and no wide curving of this river that draws
my steps toward the misty vanishing point.

Billy Collins
https://readingtothecore.com/2017/11/03/poetry-friday-the-brooklyn-museum-of-art/

Prompt Ideas

  1. Journal or write a poem about a painting or work of art

  2. Find a picutre or painting of a landscape scenery, imagine stepping into the scene, and journal or write a poem from the insdie view.

  3. What fantasies did you entertain as a child? What imaginal world would you enter and, temporarily, live within? For instance, I imagined announcing baseball games, play-by-play, using a pencil and a tiny wad of aluminum paper as a ball with baseball cards for all the players set out in their proper positions on the field in the Candlestick Park of my living room.

  4. Journal or write a poem about becoming lost in an activity or event.

  5. Collins describes the desire for the narrator to get so hopelessly lost in the painted world that he will not be able to find his way back to the museum. Journal or write a poem about the desire to disappear..

  6. Journal or write a poem about being judged as crazy.

  7. Collins ends his poem with a contrast between the seemingly crazy world umbued with imagination and the everyday world without a vaulting landscape to explore. Journal or write a poem depciting your own contrast between the real and the imagined.

  8. As usual, write about anything else in the poem or in life that inspires you.