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.