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