Introduction To Poetry -- Billy Collins

Guest poem submitted by Carl Beck:

(Poem #1773) Introduction To Poetry I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color 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. -- Billy Collins

This poem makes me smile, only because it wasn't until I stopped trying to
understand poetry that I was able to open the gate to the wonderful
playground that poetry can be.

Introduction to Poetry -- Billy Collins

Guest poem sent in by Phebe Haugen

(Poem #1397) Introduction to Poetry I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color 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. -- Billy Collins

Not long ago, when my teenage son was struggling with poetry in his English
class, I gave him this wonderful poem.  For a kid trying to figure out what
imagery is all about, this little gem offers itself as a color slide, a
hive, a dark room, a lake, a knowing, but silent, defendant.  It invites
us to engage all these images - except the last one - so that we might see
into the heart of a poem without bludgeoning the poor thing to death.

And who among us doesn't know that feeling of being the mouse dropped into
the poem, trying to probe its way out?

Phebe

Sonnet -- Billy Collins

Guest poem sent in by Supriya Nair

(Poem #1216) Sonnet All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now, and after this one just a dozen to launch a little ship on love's storm-tossed seas, then only ten more left like rows of beans. How easily it goes unless you get Elizabethan and insist the iambic bongos must be played and rhymes positioned at the ends of lines, one for every station of the cross. But hang on here wile we make the turn into the final six where all will be resolved, where longing and heartache will find an end, where Laura will tell Petrarch to put down his pen, take off those crazy medieval tights, blow out the lights, and come at last to bed. -- Billy Collins

Billy Collins is easy to love and easier to understand, but for all that, I
don't think he could be classified under "Light Verse". He almost always
manages to get serious without seeming to. But then, the things he takes
seriously are often the things which we are conditioned NOT to take seriously,
but which we secretly do care about. His realm of expertise is the marginalia
(see poem #1130) of the mind - history, literature, pets, food, and how all
these get mixed up with our daydreams and memories and form bits of our life.
He's quite like a kindly, dreamy professor going about it, and this blends
beautifully with his dry, educated humour ("Laura will tell Petrarch to put
down his pen.").

I found a book of his poems which keep me awake half the night, but I picked
this one over a lot of others because I read it with the delight of recognition
- having given an English exam recently - and the warm, fuzzy, not at all
cynical final image of the muse telling her devotee call it a day is, for me,
one of Billy Collins' finest achievements.

Supriya

Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes -- Billy Collins

Guest poem sent in by Martin Alexander

(Poem #1139) Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes First, her tippet made of tulle, easily lifted off her shoulders and laid on the back of a wooden chair. And her bonnet, the bow undone with a light forward pull. Then the long white dress, a more complicated matter with mother-of-pearl buttons down the back, so tiny and numerous that it takes forever before my hands can part the fabric, like a swimmer's dividing water, and slip inside. You will want to know that she was standing by an open window in an upstairs bedroom, motionless, a little wide-eyed, looking out at the orchard below, the white dress puddled at her feet on the wide-board, hardwood floor. The complexity of women's undergarments in nineteenth-century America is not to be waved off, and I proceeded like a polar explorer through clips, clasps, and moorings, catches, straps, and whalebone stays, sailing toward the iceberg of her nakedness. Later, I wrote in a notebook it was like riding a swan into the night, but, of course, I cannot tell you everything - the way she closed her eyes to the orchard, how her hair tumbled free of its pins, how there were sudden dashes whenever we spoke. What I can tell you is it was terribly quiet in Amherst that Sabbath afternoon, nothing but a carriage passing the house, a fly buzzing in a windowpane. So I could plainly hear her inhale when I undid the very top hook-and-eye fastener of her corset and I could hear her sigh when finally it was unloosed, the way some readers sigh when they realize that Hope has feathers, that reason is a plank, that life is a loaded gun that looks right at you with a yellow eye. -- Billy Collins

Here's a poem I like. It's sensual without being sordid and seems to do some
dignified baring of Dickinson's heart without making her stand naked and
humiliated - as the title of the poem might lead one to expect. And of
course it's full of references to her work which are affectionate without
smirking. Collins' touch is so delicate here - in both senses.

Martin

Marginalia -- Billy Collins

Guest poem sent in by Fouzaan Zafar

(Poem #1130) Marginalia Sometimes the notes are ferocious, skirmishes against the author raging along the borders of every page in tiny black script. If I could just get my hands on you, Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien, they seem to say, I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head. Other comments are more offhand, dismissive - "Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" - that kind of thing. I remember once looking up from my reading, my thumb as a bookmark, trying to imagine what the person must look like why wrote "Don't be a ninny" alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson. Students are more modest needing to leave only their splayed footprints along the shore of the page. One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's. Another notes the presence of "Irony" fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal. Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers, Hands cupped around their mouths. "Absolutely," they shout to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin. "Yes." "Bull's-eye." My man!" Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points rain down along the sidelines. And if you have manage to graduate from college without ever having written "Man vs. Nature" in a margin, perhaps now is the time to take one step forward. We have all seized the white perimeter as our own and reached for a pen if only to show we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages; we pressed a thought into the wayside, planted an impression along the verge. Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria jotted along the borders of the Gospels brief asides about the pains of copying, a bird signing near their window, or the sunlight that illuminated their page- anonymous men catching a ride into the future on a vessel more lasting than themselves. And you have not read Joshua Reynolds, they say, until you have read him enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling. Yet the one I think of most often, the one that dangles from me like a locket, was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye I borrowed from the local library one slow, hot summer. I was just beginning high school then, reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room, and I cannot tell you how vastly my loneliness was deepened, how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed, when I found on one page A few greasy looking smears and next to them, written in soft pencil- by a beautiful girl, I could tell, whom I would never meet- "Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love." -- Billy Collins

I was reading Martin's comment on Litany and thought I'd add one to the
minstrels' Billy Collins collection. I'm not sure if the comment is
outdated, but the other two Collins poems didn't have the title of
"Marginalia" so my quest became to make sure it was added.

Currently I'm a senior in high school studying Hamlet in my english
class and the poem's central theme of words written in the margins of
books is one that I find myself trapped in with my own personal copy of
Hamlet to take notes in. This coupled with the copy of Lord of the Flies
I happen to be reading (of course with comments by someone whose
handwriting leads me to believe they are a beautiful girl) make
Marginalia one to remember. I believe the essence of this poems stems
from its ability to make a personal connection with the reader,
accomplished through its numerous allusions and by addressing the reader
with "We have all seized the white perimeter...". And I can't help but
smile every time I read "Man vs. Nature."

I'm not really inclined to like poetry that lacks clear rhyme and meter
(I suspect this is due to my age) but the subtle genius of Collins
entices me like no other. Of course the last line is what takes your
breath away the first time you read it, but I particularly enjoy the
thought provoking imagery of "anonymous men catching a ride into the
future / on a vessel more lasting than themselves". Which ironically I
suppose we are all doing here.

Fouzaan Zafar

On Turning Ten -- Billy Collins

Guest poem sent in by Gregory Marton

(Poem #1096) On Turning Ten The whole idea of it makes me feel like I'm coming down with something, something worse than any stomach ache or the headaches I get from reading in bad light-- a kind of measles of the spirit, a mumps of the psyche, a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul. You tell me it is too early to be looking back, but that is because you have forgotten the perfect simplicity of being one and the beautiful complexity introduced by two. But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit. At four I was an Arabian wizard. I could make myself invisible by drinking a glass of milk a certain way. At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince. But now I am mostly at the window watching the late afternoon light. Back then it never fell so solemnly against the side of my tree house, and my bicycle never leaned against the garage as it does today, all the dark blue speed drained out of it. This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself, as I walk through the universe in my sneakers. It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends, time to turn the first big number. It seems only yesterday I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I could shine. But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life, I skin my knees. I bleed. -- Billy Collins

A very new friend, quickly becoming someone I feel like I've known my whole
life, sent me yesterday's poem, Litany in one of our first exchanges of
email, and so introduced me to our poet laureate.  I laughed and enjoyed it
and started to explore his other work online.  I found his imagined children
comforting, and his flawed adults familiar.  On Turning Ten was my favorite
and with it I replied.

Where Litany had beautifully caricatured beauty (of which Atwood's
'Variations on the word "sleep"'[Poem #1093] was a delightful example), On
Turning Ten reminds us that we each have it inside.  We sat on a sailboat
yesterday immersed in wonder, and she said if you would cut her today, she'd
shine.  So, indeed, would I.

Warmest wishes,
Gremio

Litany -- Billy Collins

(Poem #1095) Litany You are the bread and the knife, The crystal goblet and the wine... -Jacques Crickillon You are the bread and the knife, the crystal goblet and the wine. You are the dew on the morning grass and the burning wheel of the sun. You are the white apron of the baker, and the marsh birds suddenly in flight. However, you are not the wind in the orchard, the plums on the counter, or the house of cards. And you are certainly not the pine-scented air. There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air. It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge, maybe even the pigeon on the general's head, but you are not even close to being the field of cornflowers at dusk. And a quick look in the mirror will show that you are neither the boots in the corner nor the boat asleep in its boathouse. It might interest you to know, speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world, that I am the sound of rain on the roof. I also happen to be the shooting star, the evening paper blowing down an alley and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table. I am also the moon in the trees and the blind woman's tea cup. But don't worry, I'm not the bread and the knife. You are still the bread and the knife. You will always be the bread and the knife, not to mention the crystal goblet and--somehow--the wine. -- Billy Collins

It is surprising that I haven't run more poems by Billy Collins - for some
reason, even his being appointed U.S. Poet Laureate didn't really tempt me
into exploring his work. I've been reading a few of his poems recently,
though, and with increasing appreciation, and was planning to run the
haunting "I go back to the house for a book" sometime, when a friend sent me
a link to today's masterpiece.

I was totally blown away by 'Litany' - not just due to its considerable
poetic merits, but because it is so much the kind of poem I'd have loved to
have written myself, a coolly ironic commentary on the nature of Poetry that
at the same time loses none of the sense of wonder and delight that
characterises the medium. Simply beautiful, and a poem I couldn't possibly
add any further commentary to.

martin

Links:

http://www.bigsnap.com/linklibrary.html is an extensiev site devoted to
Collins

And I found today's poem in the wonderful plagiarist.com archive:
http://www.plagiarist.com/poetry/?wid=4431

Reading an Anthology of Chinese Poems of the Sung Dynasty, I Pause To Admire the Length and Clarity of Their Titles -- Billy Collins

(Poem #691) Reading an Anthology of Chinese Poems of the Sung Dynasty, I Pause To Admire the Length and Clarity of Their Titles It seems these poets have nothing up their ample sleeves they turn over so many cards so early, telling us before the first line whether it is wet or dry, night or day, the season the man is standing in, even how much he has had to drink. Maybe it is autumn and he is looking at a sparrow. Maybe it is snowing on a town with a beautiful name. "Viewing Peonies at the Temple of Good Fortune on a Cloudy Afternoon" is one of Sun Tung Po's. "Dipping Water from the River and Simmering Tea" is another one, or just "On a Boat, Awake at Night." And Lu Yu takes the simple rice cake with "In a Boat on a Summer Evening I Heard the Cry of a Waterbird. It Was Very Sad and Seemed To Be Saying My Woman Is Cruel--Moved, I Wrote This Poem." There is no iron turnstile to push against here as with headings like "Vortex on a String," "The Horn of Neurosis," or whatever. No confusingly inscribed welcome mat to puzzle over. Instead, "I Walk Out on a Summer Morning to the Sound of Birds and a Waterfall" is a beaded curtain brushing over my shoulders. And "Ten Days of Spring Rain Have Kept Me Indoors" is a servant who shows me into the room where a poet with a thin beard is sitting on a mat with a jug of wine whispering something about clouds and cold wind, about sickness and the loss of friends. How easy he has made it for me to enter here, to sit down in a corner, cross my legs like his, and listen. -- Billy Collins

I just love the way today's poem implicitly echoes the conventions of the
very same Chinese poems it explicitly pays tribute to - from the sparse,
Imagistic words it uses to its own overly expressive title [1]. I also like
the dry humour of phrases like "the simple rice cake" and "up their ample
sleeves", and the sardonic wit that came up with "Vortex on a String" and
"The Horn of Neurosis" (!)...

... of course, the humour shouldn't mask the fact that Collins is making an
important point about what he believes poetry should be and mean and do. Too
often (especially these days), poets seem to speak only to other poets, or
(even worse!) to academics and critics. And while I confess I like
cleverness and intellectual games, I have to agree with Collins in
castigating those who pursue obscurity for its own sake, who refuse to
"[make it easy] to enter [a poem] / to sit down in a corner / cross my legs
... and listen".

thomas.

[1] form, content, self-reference, Imagism, the mystery of the Orient...
wow, I managed to refer to all of my favourite critical hobby-horses in a
single sentence!

[Biography]

Billy Collins was born in New York City in 1941. He is the author of six
books of poetry, including Picnic, Lightning (University of Pittsburgh
Press, 1998); The Art of Drowning (1995), which was a finalist for the
Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Questions About Angels (1991), which was
selected by Edward Hirsch for the National Poetry Series; The Apple That
Astonished Paris (1988); Video Poems (1980); and Pokerface (1977). A
recording of Collins reading thirty-three of his poems, The Best Cigarette,
was released in 1997. Collins's poetry has appeared in anthologies,
textbooks, and a variety of periodicals, including Poetry, American Poetry
Review, American Scholar, Harper's, Paris Review, and The New Yorker. His
work has been featured in the Pushcart Prize anthology and The Best American
Poetry for 1992, 1993, and 1997. He has received fellowships from the New
York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the
Guggenheim Foundation. In 1992, he was chosen by the New York Public Library
to serve as "Literary Lion." For several years he has conducted summer
poetry workshops in Ireland at University College Galway. He is a professor
of English at Lehman College, City University of New York. He lives in
Somers, New York.

     -- The Academy of American Poets
[broken link] http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=294.

[Links]

http://www.bigsnap.com/billy.html is a very comprehensive website dedicated
to Billy Collins; it has links to several other of his poems.

We haven't had a whole lot of Chinese poetry on the Minstrels, though check
out
Poem #70, Ezra Pound, "The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter"
Poem #504, Li Po, "About Tu Fu"
Poem #683, Li Po, "To Tu Fu from Shantung"

There are also several haiku by Basho, Buson and the like; see Poem #23,
Poem #56 and Poem #277.

And finally, the essay accompanying Geoffrey Hill's "A Prayer to the Sun",
Poem #349, has more on the concept of 'necessary obscurity' in poetry.

All this, and much much more, at the Minstrels website,
http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/