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.
Two friends of mine made reference recently to a trip to Cuba: their countries allow them to do that. I thought of them yesterday on my way home from Islamorada. Here's a poem. Of sorts.
1:25 PM 12/30/2006
I could be in Cuba sitting in the Cafe Cubano in the Sunshine Supermarket sipping a cafe con leche looking at the menu taped to the wall-- Don't forget to order your whole roasted pig for the Christmas Night or New Year's Day.
The square room, tables for four pushed against whitewashed walls, the cafeteria chairs, so faded, so mauve, so leatherette, cracked linoleum, swept clean. I am eating Maria cookies reading the neon signs, ads for el presidente beer and the Lotto.
A man at the cash register folds his paper, a girl in an apron leans out the pass-through window. Music plays in Spanish. I imagine men in Havana ninety miles away listening to the same song. But something is not right; this is an old Cuba, reconstructed, remembered from before the exile. The men in their work clothes will get up from lunch and go back to work, not home to nap. This is the Keys, the Overseas Highway, as close to home as some will ever get.
Now I know why we call this the Critters and Poets Summit.... We are here in the Arctic Circle and the place has never been hotter! We are writing poetry, painting, and having a great time together. See for yourselves.
Came across this pic from the summer and realised I have not seen some of you since then! Here's an update: we spent Saturday at the bride and groom's for the Notre Dame game. Wait until you go there; it is like a first class sports bar--leather couches, great food, three TVs, and outside games for the children.
Last week was Sheila's birthday so we had dinner in Miami at the Melting Pot (Sheila, Eddie, Adam, Candy and Ralph, and Pat and I). Fondue lives!
Tomorrow is our anniversary so the G______s are taking us to a la Turca, the Mediterranean restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard. They smoke from a hookah at midnight on Tuesdays but I'm pretty sure we'll all be home in bed by then.
Last night I saw an Everglades fire--up close. Pat and I were driving home from the Keys. We'd heard the road had been closed, off and on, all day, but it was midnight and we decided to chance it. Traffic moved about 10 miles per hour along Card Sound Road. At least it moved. As we got closer to the mainland I smelled the smoke and looked up from my book to a shock. Imagine this picture* at night, a black night, the trunks glowing red and breathing, little clumps of fires reigniting on the ground near the bottoms of the trees, and all the ground smoking. It looked like the floor of Hell.
*This is not my picture, but it fits the landscape perfectly.
My friend, Shisa, linked me to a very cool project ( nytimes but you may have to register ) to map the residences of literary fictional characters who live in Manhattan. I checked it out right away and...well, gosh, they already got the first one I thought of --Nero Wolfe, America's largest detective, of West 35th Street. I think I've read all of Rex Stout's books about him. I don't care if he's fat, I love him. I am also enamored by another author whose characters are almost all from New York's Upper East Side--Louis Auchincloss. And he gives hints like "the lovely red brick Federal House in Washington Square." Also, Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities thrilled me with its depiction of the multi-million dollar New York townhouses even though I knew they were part of the "vanity" that was about to explode in "flames." Trouble is, I can't go back to the books to track down addresses because, because, because I do not own them. They were library books. Oh, no, it's true. There it is. The disadvantage of borrowing a book instead of buying one. (But seriously, you can't possibly own all the books you have read, can you? You would be walking through narrow passageways created by the stacked books in your living room, dining room, and halls.) The authors of the project named many writers to get us started and I started to list the ones I'd read* but gave up because there were too many--SO many writers place their characters in New York.
*Isaac Bashevis Singer, John Cheever, Jay McInerney, Truman Capote, Philip Roth, Ed McBain, Ira Levin, Hart Crane, Faith Ringgold, E. B. White, Tom Wolfe, Mario Puzo, Kay Thompson, Bernard Waber, Woody Allen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Herman Wouk....
Such great writers and they're just a drop in the proverbial bucket. Never mind, I'm rambling. I may not submit anyone but I'll read the finished product with delight.
We drove across the state a few days ago. It takes about an hour to cross the Everglades. I loved the scenery, the intimacy of the car, the weather. We went to meet some cousins of Pat's whom I had never met. They were FUN. Here they are (twice):
