[Note: This article originally
appeared in the PoetsWho Make Us Better column on Interlitq.]
Many poets with prestigious awards
have served as Poet Laureate for the United States, as has Billy Collins, so
you might wonder what makes him so special. For one thing, people who don’t
normally read poems buy his poetry books, contributing to his status as the
most beloved living poet in North America.
Down-to-earth or up in the clouds,
Collins has a way of studying ordinary subjects most of us can relate to and
then addressing them in an extraordinary, often amusing way. For example, in
his “first real book of poems” (since reissued) The Apple That Astonished Paris begins with “Vanishing Point” – a
subject artists are compelled to study to get the perspective right:
“You
thought it was just a pencil dot
art students made
in the middle of the canvas
before they
started painting the barn, cows, haystack,
or just a point
where railroad tracks fuse,
a spot engineers
stare at from the cabs of trains
as they clack
through the heat of prairies
heading out of
the dimensional.”
Then, in a unique turn-about, that’s
like a signature, the poet continues:
“But
here I am at the vanishing point,
looking back at
everything as it zooms toward me….”
Speaking of perspective, Collins even
addresses the viewpoint of sea creatures in “Walking Across The Atlantic.”
“…for
now I try to imagine what
this must look
like to the fish below,
the bottoms of my
feet appearing, disappearing.”
Another quirky viewpoint In “Flames”
tells us how…
“Smoky
the Bear heads
into the autumn
woods
with a red can of
gasoline
and a box of
wooden matches.”
Reportedly, Smoky has had it!
“He is sick of
dispensing
warnings to the
careless,
the half-wit
camper,
the dumbbell
hiker.
He is going to
show them
how a
professional does it.”
Later in the book, the poet gives
professional “Advice to Writers.”
“Even
if it keeps you up all night,
wash down the
walls and scrub the floor
of your study
before composing a syllable.”
The poem goes on to recommend
“cleaning” with the assurance that “The
more you clean, the more brilliant/
your writing will be….” But, after this encouragement to polish poems or
other writings, the poet ends with this suggestion:
“…cover
pages with tiny sentences
like long rows of
devoted ants
that followed you
in from the woods.”
In the book, Questions About Angels, the title poem turns its attention to one
often asked:
“Of
all the questions you might want to ask
about angels, the
only one you ever hear
is how many can
dance on the head of a pin.”
Those opening lines give an excellent
example of how Collins takes the ordinary, the familiar into another realm as
the “I” of the poem asks:
“Do
they fly through God’s body and come out singing?
Do they swing
like children from the hinges
of the spirit
world saying their names backwards and forwards?
Do they sit alone
in little gardens changing colors?’
Another poem in the book contemplates
investigating “A History of Weather.”
“The
snow flurries of Victorian London will be surveyed
along with the
gales that blew off Renaissance caps.
The tornadoes of
the Middle Ages will be explicated
and the long,
overcast days of the Dark Ages.
There will be a
section on the frozen nights of antiquity
and on the heat
that shimmered in the deserts of the Bible.”
In a more down-to-earth tone, Collins
begins the book The Art of Drowning
with a note to the “Dear Reader.”
“…you
could be the man I held the door for
this morning at
the bank or post office
or the one who
wrapped my speckled fish.
You could be
someone I passed on the street
or the face
behind the wheel of an oncoming car.”
Whether those last few words show
someone about to mow down the poet is not for me to say, but, like many others,
the title poem for that book weaves dark
threads lightly through its lines.
“I
wonder how it all got started, this business
about seeing your
life flash before your eyes
while you drown,
as if panic, or the act of submergence,
could startle
time into such compression, crushing
decades in the
vice of your desperate, final seconds.”
Instead of that last flash, the “I” of
the poem recommends:
“How
about a short animated film, a slide presentation?
Your life
expressed in an essay, or in one model paragraph?
Wouldn’t any form
be better than this sudden flash?”
For some, those questions might be
rhetorical, but Professor Collins apparently gives such matters important
consideration worthy of being dignified with answers, albeit odd.
In “The End of the World,” for
instance:
“It
is a subject so profound I feel I should
be underwater to
think about it properly.”
The poem continues:
“But
here in the calm latitudes of this room
I am thinking
that the end could be less operatic.
Maybe a black
tarpaulin, a kind of boat cover,
could be lowered
over the universe one night.
A hand could
enter the picture and crumple the cosmos
into a ball of
paper and hook it into a waste basket.”
Clearly, Billy Collins compels us to
think about things we might not otherwise consider. For example, in the book Picnic, Lightning, the poem “I Chop Some
Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey’s Version of ‘Three Blind Mice’” asks why
the farmer’s wife wanted to cut off their tails with a carving knife.
“And
I start wondering how they came to be blind.
If it was
congenital, they could be brothers and sisters….”
And….
“…how,
in their tiny darkness,
could they
possibly have run after a farmer’s wife
or anyone else’s
wife for that matter?
Not to mention
why.”
With Collins’ poems in hand, one
begins to see how much we take for granted – how many times we don’t bother to
look closer or beyond the obvious. Such probing can be delicious too, as
“Japan” reveals:
“Today
I pass the time reading
a favorite haiku,
saying the few
words over and over.
It feels like
eating
the same small,
perfect grape
again and again.
I walk through
the house reciting it
and leave its
letters falling
through the air
of every room.”
As poets and writers, we do well to
devour bushels of poetry, yet taking time to really taste each poem. And we do
well, too, to read Collins’ book, TheTrouble with Poetry, discussed, of course, in poems.
Again the poet invites us into his
world by acknowledging “You, Reader.”
“I
wonder how you are going to feel
when you find out
that I wrote this
instead of you.”
Those few beginning lines express how
I feel, reading Collins’ work: Oh, I could have written that! But I didn’t. He
did. He took the time and energy to take everyday thoughts and phrases to a new
level. Or, maybe he can’t help himself!
As the title poem, “The Trouble with
Poetry,” expresses it:
“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.”
And that’s another reason the work of
Billy Collins makes us better. It makes us want to read poetry again. It makes
us want to write.
Then, reading “Quandary” from Collins’
book Aimless Love, I wonder, too, if
poetry makes us better because we use the pen, rather than the sword, to
extinguish our enemies. To begin:
“I
was a little disappointed
in the apple I
lifted from a bowl of fruit
and bit into on
the way out the door,
fuzzy on the
inside and lacking the snap of the ripe.”
After considering “all the people/ who would be grateful to
have this apple,” the poet finishes with this quick toss of a phrase:
“Then
I took a second bite, a big one,
and pitched what
was left
over the tall
hedges hoping to hit on the head
a murderer or one
of the filthy rich out for a stroll.”
The book The Rain in Portugal shows a softer, sensitive side, however,
as “The Bard in Flight” occupies the
adjacent seat on a flight from London – presumably Shakespeare’s first plane
ride filled with the awe of ice cubes until the sudden turbulence results in…
“…the
frenzied eyes of the nervous passengers,
and the Bard
reaching for my hand
as we roared with
trembling wings
into the towering
fortress of a thunderhead.”
As one of the poets most likely
responsible for the shaping of the English language as we know it, Shakespeare
might have been more dismayed by the “Poem to the First Generation of People to
Exist After the Death of the English Language.” If you’ve ever tried reading
poetry in Middle English, these lines will mean even more to you.
“I’m
not going to put a lot of work into this
because you won’t
be able to read it anyway,
and I’ve got more
important things to do
this morning, not
the least of which
is to try to
write a fairly decent poem
for the people
who can still read English.”
The decent poem continues, lamenting “English finding/ a place in the cemetery of
dead languages,” and what a loss that would be. And,
“So
I’m going to turn the page
and not think
about you and your impoverishment.
Instead, I’m
going to write a poem about red poppies
waving by the
side of the railroad tracks,
and you people
will never even know what you’re missing.”
That last line expresses my sentiments
for those who have not yet read at least one book of Billy Collins’ poems.
…
Reviewer Mary Harwell Sayler began writing poems in childhood but, as an adult, wrote
almost everything except poetry! Eventually, she placed three dozen books in all genres including books of poems and how-to’s on poetry and writing. She
continues to maintain the Poetry Editor blog and provide resources for poets and
writers. Cyberwit.com
has just published her newest poetry book, Talking to the Wren: Haiku, Short Verse, and One Long Poem.
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