Celebrate National Poetry Month With Billy Collins

This past Tuesday, Billy Collins gave a reading at a local university. When I read that he would be coming, I knew that I wanted to attend. My first official introduction to Collins came back in 2002 when, after hearing his name tossed about in the English department of my college, I caught his guest appearance on A Prairie Home Companion. He was still Poet Laureate of the United States at the time, a distinction that was an integral part of his role in that night’s Guy Noir sketch, which still holds the distinction of my favorite of all the adventures featuring that gritty gumshoe.

How I chortled as he, Garrison Keillor and others delivered one dubious imitation after another of William Carlos Williams’ This Is Just to Say and Collins ardently discussed his recent revelation that novelists lead much more exciting lives than poets! At another point during the night came a more serious moment as he read The Lanyard, a self-deprecating tribute to his mother that I liked so much I read it myself at a college poetry night the following week. Billy Collins had won me over.

At the reading, Collins read The Lanyard again, and the many members of a large audience applauded loudly. It’s a poem in which a very simple image conveys a universal message about the inability of children raised in loving homes to repay their parents for a happy, healthy childhood.

“She gave me life and milk from her breasts, / and I gave her a lanyard. / She nursed me in many a sickroom, / lifted teaspoons of medicine to my lips, / set cold face-cloths on my forehead, / and then led me out into the airy light / and taught me to walk and swim, / and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard. / Here are thousands of meals, she said, / and here is clothing and a good education. / And here is your lanyard, I replied, / which I made with a little help from a counselor.”

Both wistful and humorous, it remains my favorite of his poems, and when I approached the table to select a volume of poems to take away from the evening, I was grateful that one of the men on the selling end pointed out, even before I could ask, which book contained that particular poem.

That’s how I came to buy a copy of The Trouble With Poetry and Other Poems, which Collins signed for me on page 45, the first page of section three, which is where The Lanyard is printed. The book contains four sections, along with one poem that serves as an introduction to the reader, spread across about 80 pages. I’m still mulling over the significance of the bear gazing placidly at the reader from the cover; haven’t quite worked that out yet. But perhaps one of these nights I will find myself awake at three o‘clock in the morning, struck with the sudden conviction that I know exactly why he put that bear there.

If bears don’t jump out at me from within the pages of the book, other creatures do. In the Evening succinctly discusses the winding down of a day, with a line each devoted to a bee, a cat and a horse. Flock is a rather twisted meditation on the 23rd Psalm inspired by the fact that each copy of the Gutenberg Bible required the skins of 300 sheep. A cat inspires a reflection on mortality in The Order of the Day, and in the darkly amusing The Revenant, the speaker is a deceased dog addressing the master who had him put to sleep.

Indeed, the subject of death comes up a number of times, sneaking its way into a majority of the poems in some form or another. It is blatant in The Peasants’ Revolt, which is at its most despairing when it speaks of “just a hole inside a larger hole / and the starless maw of space”, and Theme, in which, at one point, the speaker yearns to “echo the longing for immortality / despite the roaring juggernaut of time”.

Meanwhile, Bereft is essentially a litany of things that the dead no longer experience, culminating in this image: “More like an empty zone that souls traverse, / a vaporous place / at the end of a dark tunnel, / a region of silence except for // the occasional beating of wings - / and, I wanted to add / as the sun dazzled your lifted wineglass, / the sound of newcomers weeping.” And in Reaper, the sight of a man “carrying an enormous scythe on his shoulder” brings the speaker, who is driving down the road, a “jolt of fear // whose voltage ran from my ankles / to my scalp”. Pretty bleak stuff.

Yet just as prevalent throughout the book is humor, often just lines away from emptiness and sorrow. At other times, the entire poem is simply laugh-aloud funny. Collins read several extremely brief poems of this variety on Tuesday, but the ones in this collection are a little more complicated - or perhaps convoluted is the correct word. For instance, in The Introduction, we are told, “I don’t think this next poem / needs any introduction - / it’s best to let the work speak for itself.” What follow are references to and vague definitions of a dozen different items mentioned in the poem, none of which have any apparent connection to the title, which is finally revealed in the last line. Similarly, Freud describes a bizarre dream incorporating many disparate elements, including “a little shop called House of a Thousand Noses”. And The Lodger makes brilliant use of the phrase about beating swords into ploughshares, using it as a starting point for a series of practical transformations.

There’s something in this collection for everyone - even, I was pleased to discover, the avid LOST fan. Those who don’t share my level of obsession with this ABC show hurtling toward its long-awaited conclusion will hopefully forgive the digression, which I can’t bring myself to resist. Consider Building With Its Face Blown Off, whose title feels right at home with all the explosions that have rocked the show, and which includes “a leader on a horse,” “clouds that look like smoke” and “a man pouring wine into two glasses,” all images with deep LOST resonance. And given the centrality of mirrors in this sixth season, and their connection to a sense of self-awareness, I had to smile at this, from In the Moment: “I stared into a small oval mirror near the sink / to see if that crazy glass / had anything special to tell me today.”

And then there were the two poems in which the connections were so clear that, were it not for the publication date, I would have almost sworn that Collins was a LOST fan. In Traveling Alone, we meet a traveler who reminds me very much of Jack Shephard. He takes note of “the tiny bottles of vodka” on the airplane, as well as those whose acquaintance he makes ever so briefly at various stages of his journey. “I began to sense that all of them / were ready to open up, / to get to know me better, perhaps begin a friendship.” This makes me think of all the times in which characters have crossed paths back in the “real world,” little knowing that they would become intimately acquainted in the future, and in Sideways World, suspecting a connection but not understanding it. And then there’s this delicious little nugget: “And was I so wrong in seeing in Ben’s eyes / a glimmer of interest in my theories / and habits - my view of the Enlightenment, // my love of cards, the hours I tended to keep?”

Finally, Statues in the Park, taken as a whole, reads like a love letter to redshirts. While walking through a park filled with memorials to fallen soldiers from the Civil War, the speaker thinks about all of those whose deaths have gone largely unnoticed by society at large. Those whose names were not carved into an impressive-looking bit of stone, rather like those actors whose names have never been listed in the opening credits of LOST, whose characters have never been mentioned by any of the most prominent castaways. But what really got my attention was the line “In the shadow of the statue”. It stopped me dead in my tracks, and I simply stared for a moment, so that when I went on to the next line, I burst out laughing. I now had, “In the shadow of the statue, / I wondered about the others”. Now there is a statement that has LOST written all over it. What it looks like to me are the first two lines of a poem in which Sun recalls her experience in the season five finale, surrounded by people she doesn’t know, all of whom she previously considered enemies. Am I inspired? Perhaps...

If you lean toward the poetic, there’s a good chance you’ll find inspiration here too, especially as so many poems deal with the act of writing poetry. You, Reader gives us this wonderful insight into the communal nature of the writing process: “I was only thinking / about the shakers of salt and pepper / that were standing side by side on a place mat. / I wondered if they had become friends / after all these years / or if they were still strangers to one another // like you and I / who manage to be known and unknown / to each other at the same time - // me at this table with a bowl of pears, / you leaning in a doorway somewhere / near some blue hydrangeas, reading this.” So does Eastern Standard Time, which begins “Poetry speaks to all people, it is said, / but here I would like to address / only those in my own time zone”.

Monday is built around the idea that “the poets are at their windows,” which is their proper place in the world. “Just think - ” he posits, “before the invention of the window, / the poets would have had to put on a jacket / and a winter hat to go outside / or remain indoors with only a wall to stare at.” Evidently he also finds the bathtub an ideal spot for musing, as we read in The Long Day that “I closed my eyes and thought / about the alphabet, / the letters filing out of the halls of kindergarten // to become literature. / If the British call z zed, / I wondered, why not call b bed and d dead? // And why does z, which looks like / the fastest letter, come at the very end?”

Finally, there is the title poem, again a reflection on poetry as an interactive experience between writer and reader. With a chagrined comic touch, Collins speaks of the way in which poets draw inspiration from each other. “But mostly poetry fills me / with the urge to write poetry, / to sit in the dark and wait for a little flame / to appear at the tip of my pencil. // And along with that, the longing to steal, / to break into the poems of others / with a flashlight and a ski mask. // And what an unmerry band of thieves we are, / cut-purses, common shoplifters...” What thieves indeed - though I contend that perhaps the poets rob from the rich to give to the poor, and that the victims may find themselves enriched in the process.

I’m an old-fashioned gal who tends to veer toward poetry of the rhymed variety. Billy Collins doesn’t rhyme, at least not often, but he has, to quote again from The Lanyard, “two clear eyes to read the world,” and what he sees is both extraordinary and marvelously commonplace. Collins writes with a wit and accessibility that might just encourage the fervent verse loather to give poetry another chance. This Poetry Month, pick up a collection of poems by Billy Collins. Then pick up a pen.

Walking Thunder Is a Family-Friendly Frontier Film

A little while back, I rented the movie Higher Ground, a made-for-TV film from the 1980s starring John Denver and featuring two of his songs. When I saw that Netflix also had Walking Thunder, another John Denver movie, I was eager to give that a shot too.

Written and directed by Craig Clyde, Walking Thunder is a movie of comparable tone and quality. It’s a family-friendly film involving father-son conflict, explorations of the wilderness and interactions with indigenous people. Unlike Higher Ground, this movie is mostly set in the 1800s, though it is framed in the present as a boy reads the journal of one of his ancestors.

The movie has a bit of a Little House on the Prairie feel to it, except that the children in the McKay family are boys rather than girls. Patriarch John (Denver) is restless and rugged, not content to remain with a steady job when it means he has to be employed by someone else. His wife Emma (Irene Miracle) tries to be patient, but her frustration with his choices becomes apparent after an accident leaves them stranded in the mountains for the winter. To make matters worse, she is expecting their third child in just a couple of months.

To Jacob (David Tom) and his younger brother, this is all a grand adventure, especially once they cross paths with mountain man Abner Murdoch (James Read) and his elderly companion, the mystical Dark Wind (Ted Thin Elk). These are the two most engaging characters in the movie. Abner is an exotic outsider who instantly has the adulation of Jacob, though he tries to discourage it. Meanwhile, though Dark Wind doesn’t speak English, he becomes an invaluable asset to the rest of the family when Jacob joins Abner on a trip to the trading post.

This is a wholesome, family-friendly movie, and it features some spectacular landscapes, not to mention a number of scenes involving Walking Thunder (Bart the Bear), an enormous bear with a strange connection to the land where the McKays have decided to settle for the winter. The pace is a bit plodding; it’s an hour and a half long but feels considerably longer.

There’s something a little wooden about most of the acting and dialogue, and Denver is no exception to that, though John does share some nice moments of vulnerability with Jacob. He has a very serious air about him throughout the movie, rarely smiling and looking especially solemn with his jumbo-sized mustache. And, most unfortunately, he doesn’t do any singing at all. The setting seems very fitting for him, though.

I’m not sure how well this movie would hold the attention of most children. Jacob is reasonably engaging, and there are some bad guys who blunder in partway through to provide a mix of menace and comic relief. On the whole, though, the comedy quotient is pretty low, and the story tends toward the excessively didactic at times. For kids interested in frontier times, this would probably be a good choice, however. A kind of throwback to some of the old live action Wonderful World of Disney movies, Walking Thunder is also John Denver’s last movie, having been completed the year he died. While it’s not the most thrilling frontier saga I’ve ever seen, I think he would be proud of the results.

Number 2700: The Story Behind the Song Is Chicken Soup for the Music Lover's Soul

Three years ago, my friend Libbie and I went to see Music and Lyrics, a romantic comedy that also has a lot to do with the songwriting process. I found it both entertaining and inspiring, as it helped motivate me to do some more lyric-writing. This past Christmas, Libbie gave me Chicken Soup for the Soul: The Story Behind the Song. I was anxious to read it, and I also hoped that it would provide a similar boost. Given my love of music as both a fan and an aspiring lyricist, I thought this would be a fitting review with which to mark my 2700th post on Epinions.

Chicken Soup for the Soul is a series of books, each featuring 101 contributions pertaining to a particular theme. Usually, a majority of the authors in any given book are ordinary people who happen to have a great story to tell. Libbie and I both have read several of these feel-good collections, and I even had a poem included in 2008’s Chicken Soup for the Soul: Love Stories. This volume is a little different in that every contributor is a songwriter, or at least is intimately acquainted with one. It’s a bit on the long side as each entry includes the lyrics to the song in question after the reflection on what brought that song about. Some of these entries are quite detailed; most are between one and two pages.

Another difference between this book and most others in the series is the fact that there are no sub-sections. Typically, a book will be divided into several smaller categories, ranging from the silly to the tragic. In this volume, the arrangement is alphabetical by the last name of the song’s composer. In most cases, this is also the person who wrote the essay. One exception to this is Ingrid Croce, who writes about the people and circumstances inspiring Operator and Bad, Bad Leroy Brown, two hits by her late husband Jim Croce. I’ve always been a big fan of his, so I was especially interested in those stories, and I had to chuckle over the fact that as many as 40 guys have approached Ingrid over the years to identify themselves as “the real Leroy Brown”.

As I perused this book, I was surprised at how many of the songs I didn’t recognize. Only about a quarter of the songs were ones I knew. No doubt everyone who picks up this book will gravitate toward different songs and songwriters. My interests tend toward classic and folk-rock. While most of my favorite songwriters - Paul Simon, Gordon Lightfoot, Billy Joel, Elton John and Paul McCartney, to name a few - did not chime in, I enjoyed reading about several songs from artists I’m not quite as familiar with, and the book introduced me to plenty of songs that were new to me.

Among the entries that interested me most were the reflections on Bohemian Rhapsody (Roy Thomas Baker), That’s What Friends Are For (Carole Bayer Sager), Right Here Waiting (Richard Marx), The Rose (Amanda McBroom) and Eye of the Tiger (Jim Peterik). One of the most detailed entries is Tony Asher’s recollection of writing Wouldn’t It Be Nice with Brian Wilson after a chance meeting brought them together in the mid-sixties. Asher talks about the back-and-forth nature of their collaborative process and the way they pushed the envelope with this song, which now seems so innocent.

Chicken Soup for the Soul books are always designed so that you can skip around as much as you like, reading an essay here and an essay there and not worrying about the order in which the stories are presented. I’ve certainly read The Story Behind the Song in this way, often opening it up at random and seeing what song I end up with. The first entry that I read was Tom Higgenson’s description of how he came to write Hey There, Delilah as a tribute to a girl he liked but didn’t know very well. There was a very appealing sweetness and scrappiness to the story, as he hadn’t really hit the big time yet when he wrote the song in fulfillment to a promise that he had made to this young woman. I must have had his reflections rolling around in my head for the next month or so because my streak of new LOST filksongs began in February with a parody of Hey There, Delilah.

If you’re interested in songwriting or the music business in general, The Story Behind the Song is a fun and fascinating collection that celebrates songs spanning half a century. My only complaint is that it makes me curious about what a lot of other songwriters would have to say about their own work. I’m hoping that they will consider a follow-up volume and that even more musicians will participate. Until then, this volume has plenty to keep me reading.

Sheldon Cooper Is a Spock-Magnitude Masterpiece in The Big Bang Theory

I am not an especially scientific person, but I’ve always had an odd attraction to fictional uber-geeks. Spock, the original Blue Ranger and LOST's Daniel Faraday are just a few of the eggheads who have won my affections. It was Spock who helped me discover another to add to this list.

It was the fall of 2008, and seemingly every time I flipped the channel to CBS, I saw a promo for The Big Bang Theory in which Sheldon, the brightest, most socially awkward of the main quartet of young scientists on the show, explains the rules to “Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock,” a more complex version of the traditional game. That’s supposed to make it more interesting, but naturally, once Spock is in the mix, everybody chooses the Vulcan, turning it into one big stalemate. I’d seen ads for the show before, but this was the one that hooked me, the one that convinced me to check it out during its second season. I’ve been a fan ever since. My brother Nathan bought the first season on DVD, and over spring break he brought it home, so I was able to catch up on everything I missed, so now I can consider my fandom complete.

Season one consists of seventeen episodes, each with a title that sounds like an oddball experiment or theory. For instance, The Luminous Fish Effect, The Middle Earth Paradigm and The Nerdvana Annihilation. Right off the bat, we are in introduced to the comedy’s five key players. Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons) and Leonard Hofstadter (Johnny Galecki) are roommates. Both are physicists, and both have a tendency to amuse themselves with things like Klingon Boggle, Halo tournaments and arguments over arcane bits of Marvel trivia.

But Sheldon resides in the upper stratosphere of nerdiness, so wrapped up in his own brilliance that he is both unwilling and unable to grasp even the most basic of social niceties. Leonard is a bit more down-to-earth, and when Penny (Kaley Cuoco), a beautiful, sweet-natured waitress moves in next door, he immediately develops a raging crush on her. Soon thereafter, we meet girl-crazy Jewish aerospace engineer Howard Wolowitz (Simon Helberg) and painfully shy Indian astrophysicist Raj Koothrappali (Kunal Nayyar). All four scientists work at Caltech.

Virtually all of the show’s humor derives from the interaction among these five characters. It’s fun when the guys get together and revel in their own nerdiness. For instance, in one episode, they are invited to Penny’s Halloween party, and each of them decides to go as The Flash. After they agree to wear different costumes, their choices range from Leonard as Frodo Baggins to Sheldon as The Doppler Effect. In another episode, Leonard buys the time machine from the movie of the same title, and the other three eagerly chip in for some time with the impressive prop.

I love it when the show focuses on the guys’ appreciation for science fiction and fantasy. I’m not so crazy about it when it the concentration is on their hormones. Sheldon remains utterly detached from the entire notion of romance, despite the fact that in one episode he unintentionally woos a date away from Raj. But the other guys are always bringing it up. Howard is the worst, always ready with a sleazy one-liner and obsessed with hooking up with pretty much any girl who will have him. While Penny generally enjoys the company of the other three, she shows consistent disdain for Howard. Raj, meanwhile, is quiet and sensitive, and throughout much of this first season he is physically incapable of speaking to a woman unless he is intoxicated. He’s much more likable than his best friend, but the two are rarely out of each other’s company, so if Raj is around, you have to put up with Howard, easily my least favorite of the quintet.

Leonard’s intense attraction to Penny is reminiscent of Niles’ obsession with Daphne in Frasier. There’s a similar dynamic between the two of them, with Penny the kind, salt-of-the-earth, attractive woman and Leonard the infatuated intellectual. The two quickly form a bond of friendship, and Penny’s genuine good will is what makes it so easy to root for the relationship. She has a habit of getting together with real dirt bags, and despite the major differences in their characters, you want to see her with a nice guy for a change, and for his devotion to her to be rewarded.

But it’s Sheldon who makes the show so riveting for me. A fascinating character brilliantly portrayed by Parsons, he is one guy who would have no trouble making sense of LOST’s time travel season. The gears in his head are always turning, allowing him to turn the most ordinary of objects into the inspiration for a head-spinning diatribe. Sheldon is hyper-intelligent, as well as just plain hyper. He has dozens of little ideosyncrasies, from the fact that he always has to sit in the same chair to his insistence on preceding each attempt to enter a room with a forceful series of three knocks and shouting the name of whoever he expects to be inside, and repeating the process until someone opens the door. On the one hand, intellectually speaking, he’s far ahead of even Leonard, Raj and Howard, but this is balanced out by his utter confusion with ordinary social conventions. It takes him most of the first season to begin to understand sarcasm, and empathy tends to elude him too, though in his own strange way, he proves to be a pretty devoted friend, especially, oddly enough, to Penny, who can never seem to decide whether she finds him infuriating or endearing.

All of the guys have issues with their mothers. We don’t meet Leonard’s in the first season, but she is a psychologist with a forceful personality whose methods have clearly scarred him a bit. Raj’s mother is occasionally seen via internet videoconferencing, along with his father, and they both try to control his life from afar, particularly in the romance department. Howard lives with his mother, and we’ve heard her voice in several episodes but never seen her. Their interactions consist of her bellowing at him from across the house.

Sheldon’s mother has made only two appearances on the show, one of them in the first season, but we also occasionally hear his side of a phone call with her, and he often mentions his upbringing in a conservative Christian home. While he and his mother have radically different worldviews, he does have a great deal of respect for her, and she is about the only person who can truly keep him in line. He also recalls her fondly in moments of distress. In one episode, he falls sick, and he yearns to replicate the conditions of his childhood, even asking Penny to sing the song his mother sang to him on such occasions. Sheldon becomes even more childlike when mentioning his beloved grandmother, whom he calls Mee-maw.

In general, I enjoy Sheldon’s background, but I’m very annoyed by the canned laughter that follows any statement his mother makes relating to her faith. None of the main characters is overtly religious, and logic-driven Sheldon clearly has no time for it, but I see no need for the outright contempt the show seems to display for Christianity whenever his mom is involved. Howard’s cracks about his own cultural heritage sometimes rankle too, but then so does almost everything he says.

So yeah, sometimes the treatment of religion on the show bugs me, and I would prefer a little less smut and a little less Howard in general. But as long as Sheldon is the show’s centerpiece, which he certainly is in the first season, I intend to keep tuning in.