Talk Talk

Billy Collins at the DBF

This is for Peter who nagged me ever so gently for a review.

Reading Billy Collins is fun. You don’t have to keep linking back and forth to the online dictionary, parsing the poetic sentence to determine the complete thought, and wondering what the heck was he saying, anyway? Billy Collins’ poems are accessible and yet they still pay off because they are, like all good poems, about life’s beauty and death’s inevitability. But listening to Billy Collins is even more fun—because he’s funny. Yep, laugh-out-loud funny.

I know this because I saw him speak last Friday outside Atlanta at the AJC Decatur Book Festival. The venue, Agnes Scott College, was packed beyond standing room. The line queued around Presser Hall (of interest to me only in an unpractical way as I accompanied my brother-in-law to our VIP seats right up front—thanks, Sis) a hundred deep an hour before show time.

Mr. Collins, whom I’m dying to call Billy, was relaxed in a friendly open-collared way. His a-little-too-longish hair stuck out in those Bozo tufts which he must know added to the comedic sense surrounding him. He chose poems he knew would get a laugh and his timing was perfect. Also perfect were his set ups; he introduced each poem with just enough information to fully welcome the audience to it. I’d always been amused by Billy Collins’ poems on the page but his reading found the absurdities I’d missed in my own. He was humble—I had forced a pseudo-seriousness on him that didn’t quite fit.

One of the first poems he read was “Fishing On The Susquehanna In July.” I was charmed because its subject sprang from the painting I remembered studying in grammar school. Herman Herzog's Fishing On The Susquehanna

Its first line, “I have never been fishing on the Susquehanna,” opened the poem to its humor. Neither have I ever fished the Susquehanna, but its image is a part of the American landscape just as Collins poetry has become a part of American culture.

Another poem he read was “I Chop Some Parsley While Listening To Art Blakey’s Version Of “Three Blind Mice.” This one spoke of the power of music to soften “the cynic who always lounges within.” An interesting aside here from the poet was that "mice" tend to “come to the surface” in his poems.

Collins said his poem "Litany" was a send-up of two lines he had come across by another poet and parodied. His emulation took the poem in a new direction and I'll bet, I enjoyed it so much, to a new height. It begins with a comparison, as love poems often have done, to a woman's beauty: "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"; it segues to an assessment of the speaker/poet himself. The audience got a great kick out of his delivery of the following lines:

 

It might interest you to know

speaking of the plentiful imagery in 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.

But it is his affection for his subject that makes me fond of Billy Collins. The poem's last line speaks of love's intoxicating properties: "But don't worry...//you will always be.../..somehow--the wine." 

That’s how Billy Collins is in person—like a glass of good wine—he makes you feel good and you want a little more.

A Poem

I think about the brain and how it retrieves information, the alphabetical filing, the color coding, the associations, etc. We say, what's that word? It begins with a ...g?

Sometimes I solve sudokus but lately I think the discipline of formal poetry might be a better exercise (on many levels).

So I am charmed by this birthday poem written by Brad Leithauser [from the NYROB (May 29, 2008)].  The rhyme scheme is some sort of terza rhyma, I guess, and the final tercet of each stanza is an envoy employing the rhymes of lines 2, 5, and 8.

Old Globe

For her big birthday
we gave her (nothing less would do)
the world, which is to say

a globe copyrighted the very year
she was born—ninety years before.
She held it tenderly, and it was clear

both had come such a long way:
the lovely, dwindled, ever-eager-to-please
woman whose memory had begun to fray

and a planet drawn and redrawn through
endless shifts of aims and loyalties,
and war and war.

*

Her eye fell at random. “Formosa,” she read.
“Now that’s pretty. Is it there today?”
A pause. “It is,” my brother said,

“though now it’s called Taiwan.”
She looked apologetic. “I sometimes forget…”
“Like Sri Lanka,” I added. “Which was Ceylon.”

And so my brothers and I, globe at hand, began:
which places had seen a change of name
in the last ninety years? Burma, Baluchistan,

Czechoslovakia, Abyssinia, Transjordan, Tibet.
Because she laughed, we extended our game
into history, mist: Vineland, Persia, Cathay…

*

She was in a middle place—
her fifties—when photos were first transmitted,
miraculously, from outer space.

Who could believe those men—in their black noon—
got up like robots, wandering the wild
wastelands of the moon,

and overheard a wholly naked sun
and an Earth so far away
it was less real than this one,

the gift received today—
the globe she’d so tenderly fitted
under her arm, like a child.

*

Finally, there’s cake: nine candles in a ring.
…Just so, the past turns distant past,
each rich decade diminishing

to a little stick of wax, rapidly
expiring. I say, “Now make a wish before
you blow them out.” She says, “I don’t see—”

stops. Then mildly protests: “But they look so nice.”
We laugh at her—and wince when a look of doubt
or fear clouds her face; she needs advice.

Well—what should anyone wish for
in blowing candles out
but that the light might last?

poetic email response to a poem

4443, 2743

 by Carol Saba

 

for Mary Cornish    

 

She makes the craft

look so easy,

almost prosy,

doesn't she?

But it's

definitely poetry

and sounds so nice

read aloud.

:-)

 

 

Numbers

Mary Cornish

I like the generosity of numbers.
The way, for example,
they are willing to count
anything or anyone:
two pickles, one door to the room,
eight dancers dressed as swans.

I like the domesticity of addition--
add two cups of milk and stir--
the sense of plenty: six plums
on the ground, three more
falling from the tree.

And multiplication's school
of fish times fish,
whose silver bodies breed
beneath the shadow
of a boat.

Even subtraction is never loss,
just addition somewhere else:
five sparrows take away two,
the two in someone else's
garden now.

There's an amplitude to long division,
as it opens Chinese take-out
box by paper box,
inside every folded cookie
a new fortune.

And I never fail to be surprised
by the gift of an odd remainder,
footloose at the end:
forty-seven divided by eleven equals four,
with three remaining.

Three boys beyond their mothers' call,
two Italians off to the sea,
one sock that isn't anywhere you look.

 

from Poetry magazine
Volume CLXXVI, Number 3, June 2000

Copyright 2000 by The Modern Poetry Association.

Email

I read way more reviews of books than actual books. Often the review renders the read unnecessary. I find out that the book is just not going to be that good, or the review was so good it told me all I wanted to know. For whatever reason, I sometimes prefer the review (short, pithy, and pointed) to the book anyway. They do after all, have different subject matters.

Janet Malcolm recently reviewed in the NYROB Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home
by David Shipley and Will Schwalbe. Here's my favorite paragraph from her review:

On the face of it, an email and a letter are the same thing: a piece of writing addressed to one or several persons. But letter-writing was never the fraught activity that email-writing is. Shipley and Schwalbe believe that the trouble derives from a fundamental flaw in email for which the user has to compensate:

If you don't consciously insert tone into an email, a kind of universal default tone won't automatically be conveyed. Instead, the message written without regard to tone becomes a blank screen onto which the reader projects his own fears, prejudices and anxieties.

I love that idea--that there is no 'universal default tone.' As a poet, I am most interested in the tone of a piece. And I often wonder how best to convey the right tone in my writing. But even better is the 'blank screen' idea. Hah! and OMG! I better be careful:-)