Billy Collins

Published by bryan | Filed under journal entries

from Don’s journal

24.Feb.08
I’ve been carrying around a Billy Collins collection called Sailing Alone Around the Room for nearly a month now. I don’t think I’ve enjoyed a writer more since discovering Annie Dillard back in the day. Collins is a New York poet and served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001-2003, which says a good thing about our country. Chiefly it says we aren’t pretentious. At least as a country. God knows poetry lovers are pretentious. But Collins is an every-mans poet, not afraid to mix humor into his work. His work is accessible, and he is not “also” saying how smart he is, or how cultured.

I’ve brought the book with me to meet with friends, and read them lines that made us laugh. I’ve brought it with me to business meetings and opened with a couple poems (it sounds strange, but I am in the business of books). I sent the book to my girl for valentines day and told her which one I thought she would like the most, which she did. And so now I will share some of his poems with you.

Sailing Alone Around the Room is the book I suggest if you haven’t read his stuff. It’s a collection from his other books, along with a few new poems. Consider it a greatest hits, if you want. Here is the opening poem, and it gives a good feel for Collins tone and imagination:

Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep A Gun In The House

The neighbors’ dog will not stop barking.
He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark
that he barks every time they leave the house.
They must switch him on on their way out.

The neighbors’ dog will not stop barking.
I close all the windows in the house
and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast
but I can still hear him muffled under the music,
barking, barking, barking,

and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra,
his head raised confidently as if Beethoven
had included a part for barking dog.

When the record finally ends he is still barking,
sitting there in the oboe section barking,
his eyes fixed on the conductor who is
entreating him with his baton

while the other musicians listen in respectful
silence to the famous barking dog solo,
that endless coda that first established
Beethoven as an innovative genius.

Collins teaches poetry at a college in New York, and in this poem reflects on how his students often fail to understand what poetry is for, that being for enjoyment. But I think this poem could work for the average seminary student studying the Bible as well:

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

And here is the one I sent my sweetheart for Valentines Day. As such, it is my favorite:

Dancing Toward Bethlehem

If there is only enough time in the final
minutes of the twentieth century for one last dance
I would like to be dancing it slowly with you,

say, in the ballroom of a seaside hotel.
My palm would press into the small of your back
as the past hundred years collapsed into a pile
of mirrors or buttons or frivolous shoes,

just as the floor of the ninteenth century gave way
and disappeared in a red cloud of brick dust.
There will be no time to order another drink
or worry about what was never said,

not with the orchestra sliding into the sea
and all our attention devoted to humming
whatever it was they were playing.

(All poems by Billy Collins, found in Sailing Alone Around the Room, Random House)

Don