Billy Collins Sunday - You, Reader

You, Reader
by Billy Collins from The Trouble with Poetry (Random House)

I wonder how you are going to feel
when you find out
that I wrote this instead of you,

that it was I who got up early
to sit in the kitchen
and mention with a pen

the rain-soaked windows,
the ivy wallpaper,
and the goldfish circling in its bowl.

Go ahead and turn aside,
bite your lip and tear out the page,
but, listen-- it was just a matter of time

before one of us happened
to notice the unlit candles
and the clock humming on the wall.

Plus, nothing happened that morning--
a song on the radio,
a car whistling along the road outside--

and 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.


This seemed to me to be the perfect poem for a dreary Sunday on which nothing much is happening.  Instead of getting up early and writing, my day has been spent reading-- blogs; the newspaper;the Ruth Rendell mystery I started on Friday; junk mail, old to do lists, and articles that have accumulated on my desk.

I love the idea that it is on ordinary days such as this, in the midst or ordinary tasks that ordinary thoughts, such as wondering about the relationship between the salt and pepper shakers, can take shape into a not-so-ordinary poem or essay or story.  The more I write, the more I realize that this is the way the writing life works, at least for me-- more, "Hmmmm," than, "Eureka!"

So yes Billy Collins, you were the one who got up early and wrote this poem.  But the day will come when I will be the one to get up early (or earlyish).  And on that morning I will notice the way the banana and apple are cuddling in the fruit bowl.  And I'll write a poem about that, and maybe mention too, that they make a delicious fruit salad when peeled and sliced and sauteed in a dab of butter with a little nutmeg and cinnamon.  And then who will be biting their lip then, Mr. Collins, envious of my poem or perhaps, just my breakfast. 



Autumn, by Giuseppe Arcimbaldo
An artist who painted extraordinary
portraits composed of ordinary objects

A Billy Collins and Mary Oliver Two For . . .

I was so engrossed in reading over the weekend that I forgot to write until late last night when I was two books down and well into an amazing novel (Afterwards by Rosamund Lupton).  Instead of blogging, I opted to continue to read until well past the hour I told myself I should go to sleep.  Even as I sit at my desk to get my writing in before taking my BFF out for lunch to celebrate his birthday, I can feel the siren song of Lupton's story calling me to abandon my work and read.  But I'll resist until this evening. 

Was it really their singing voices or the fact that they'd stumbled upon an   
island populated by scantily clad women that attracted sailors to the sirens? 

Since I missed Billy Collins Sunday, I figured it was a great opportunity to combine it with Mary Oliver Monday and mention, especially for those in the DC area, that Billy Collins and Mary Oliver are doing a joint reading at Strathmore on Sunday, October 28.  Information about the event and a link to purchase tickets can be found here.  The program description is vague.  It basically just gives bios for both poets so it will be interesting to see what actually happens on stage.  Will they have a conversation about poetry?  Comment on each others' poems and their own?  Or simply get up and take turns reading like a game of tag between poets?

Whatever they do, I'm sure it will be enlightening and lovely.  In the meantime, here are a couple links to Billy Collins and Mary Oliver doing talks/readings in other settings.  They're a bit longer than the You Tube links I've posted in the past but are well worth watching.

The first is a TED talk by Billy Collins where he presents five of his poems that have been animated and shares his wisdom about making poetry accessible and available to readers, and making poetry from the perspective of the poet.  It really captures his wry sense of humor.

The second video is an introduction to a conversation between Coleman Barks and Mary Oliver that begins with her reading a few poems.  Watching the honey tongued Barks question the poet is like finding two fortunes in your cookie-- you get an extra dose of wisdom and humor.  The entire 45 minute reading and conversation can be found here

Billy Collins Sunday - Consolation

Consolation from Sailing Alone Around the Room (Random House)

How agreeable it is not to be touring Italy this summer,
wandering her cities and ascending her torrid hilltowns.
How much better to cruise these local, familiar streets,
fully grasping the meaning of every roadsign and billboard
and all the sudden hand gestures of my compatriots.

There are no abbeys here, no crumbling frescoes or famous
domes and there is no need to memorize a succession
of kings or tour the dripping corners of a dungeon.
No need to stand around a sarcophagus, see Napoleon's
little bed on Elba, or view the bones of a saint under glass.

How much better to command the simple precinct of home
than be dwarfed by pillar, arch, and basilica.
Why hide my head in phrase books and wrinkled maps?
Why feed scenery into a hungry, one-eyes camera
eager to eat the world one monument at a time?

Instead of slouching in a café ignorant of the word for ice,
I will head down to the coffee shop and the waitress
known as Dot. I will slide into the flow of the morning
paper, all language barriers down,
rivers of idiom running freely, eggs over easy on the way.

And after breakfast, I will not have to find someone
willing to photograph me with my arm around the owner.
I will not puzzle over the bill or record in a journal
what I had to eat and how the sun came in the window.
It is enough to climb back into the car

as if it were the great car of English itself
and sounding my loud vernacular horn, speed off

down a road that will never lead to Rome, not even Bologna.

From vacation in 2009 - Welsh countryside

I've been experiencing a bit of wanderlust lately.  Maybe it's because I've been reading books set in far away landscapes or because it's been three years since my last transatlantic trip.  Or perhaps it is because it's almost August in DC which means that almost everyone in town is headed out of town. Probably though, it's because I need a vacation.

The first definition of vacation in the Merriam-Webster dictionary is "a respite or time of respite from something."  I like the ambiguity of that particular definition because that's how I'm feeling.  I need a respite from . . .something. 

Do I need vacation from
Inspectors Lewis and Hathaway?

What that something is though, I can't quite put my finger on, which makes for difficult planning.  Do I need to get away from it all (or just a little bit of it) for a day or two?  Or would a "staycation" suffice?  Is it new stimuli I'm craving-- people watching at cafes, wandering through old churches, strolling through art galleries?  Or maybe it's just little things from which I need a vacation-- British detective shows, Facebook, the same old breakfast every morning.  I'm really not sure.

So in the next few weeks while my friends are off on cruises down the Danube or strolling the streets of Istanbul, I'll be here, taking consolation in the lighter than usual traffic and maybe, eventually, taking a respite from something.

Billy Collins Sunday - This Little Piggy Went to Market

THIS LITTLE PIGGY WENT TO MARKET      
by Billy Collins from Ballistics (Random House)

is the usual thing to say when you begin
pulling on the toes of a small child,
and I have never had a problem with that.
I could easily picture the piggy with his basket
and his trotters kicking up the dust on an imaginary road.

What always stopped me in my tracks was
the middle toe -- this little piggy ate roast beef.
I mean I enjoy a roast beef sandwich
with lettuce and tomato and a dollop of horseradish,
but I cannot see a pig ordering that in a delicatessen.

I am probably being too literal-minded here --
I am even wondering why it's called "horseradish."
I should just go along with the beautiful nonsense
of the nursery, float downstream on its waters.
After all, Little Jack Horner speaks to me deeply.

I don't want to be the one to ruin the children's party
by asking unnecessary questions about Puss in Boots
or, again, the implications of a pig eating beef.
By the way, I am completely down with going
"Wee wee wee" all the way home,
having done that many times and knowing exactly how it feels.

When I woke up this morning and realized that April Fool's Day coincided with Billy Collins Sunday, I decided it was the perfect day for  a poem that contains the phrase "beautiful nonsense."
Although some nursery rhymes are thinly veiled political jibes or lessons in history, This Little Piggy is purely a nonsense rhyme written to delight children. 

Allowing ourselves to be delighted, to revel in beauty and nonsense, to put aside our critical thinking caps that  make us wonder why a pig would eat roast beef (and the one who didn't have any?  was it by choice?  was she a vegetarian sow?,  to be in the moment so we can be present and grateful for the things that make us go, "wee!"-- good aspirations for this April Fool's Sunday.

The Chairs That No One Sits In

THE CHAIRS THAT NO ONE SITS IN
by Billy Collins from Horoscopes for the Dead (Random House)

You see them on porches and on lawns

down by the lakeside,

usually arranged in pairs implying a couple

 

who might sit there and look out

at the water or the big shade trees.

The trouble is you never see anyone

 

sitting in these forlorn chairs

though at one time it must have seemed

a good place to stop and do nothing for a while.

 

Sometimes there is a little table

between the chairs where no one

is resting a glass or placing a book facedown.

 

It might be none of my business,

but it might be a good idea one day

for everyone who placed those vacant chairs

 

on a veranda or a dock to sit down in them

for the sake of remembering

whatever it was they thought deserved

 

to be viewed from two chairs

side by side with a table in between.

The clouds are high and massive that day. 

 

The woman looks up from her book.

The man takes a sip of his drink.

Then there is nothing but the sound of their looking,

 

the lapping of lake water, and a call of one bird

then another, cries of joy or warning—

it passes the time to wonder which.

 

 

    Chairs that I don't sit in are leaning against the dogwood tree in the back yard, books I don't read are stacked two deep on shelves, recipes I haven't tried are spilling out of an accordian folder, poems I haven't written are tucked in the corners of my mind.

 

    But today, today is an opportunity to do something that has been left undone . . .

 

What will you do with the opportunity you have today?

Billy Collins Sunday - Nostalgia

NOSTALGIA
by Billy Collins from Sailing Alone Around the Room (Random House)

Remember the 1340's? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.
You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade,
and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular,
the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework.
Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,
and at night we would play a game called "Find the Cow."
Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today.

Where has the summer of 1572 gone? Brocade and sonnet
marathons were the rage. We used to dress up in the flags
of rival baronies and conquer one another in cold rooms of stone.
Out on the dance floor we were all doing the Struggle
while your sister practiced the Daphne all alone in her room.
We borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang.
These days language seems transparent a badly broken code.

The 1790's will never come again. Childhood was big.
People would take walks to the very tops of hills
and write down what they saw in their journals without speaking.
Our collars were high and our hats were extremely soft.
We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs.
It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.

I am very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821.
Europe trembled while we sat still for our portraits.
And I would love to return to 1901 if only for a moment,
time enough to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps,
or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941, or at least let me
recapture the serenity of last month when we picked
berries and glided through afternoons in a canoe.

Even this morning would be an improvement over the present.
I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees
and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light
flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse
and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks.

As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past,
letting my memory rush over them like water
rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream.
I was even thinking a little about the future, that place
where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine,
a dance whose name we can only guess.

Nostalgia seems to be a trending theme in popular culture lately.  Mad Men and Great Gatsby inspired dresses strolled down the runways in New York and Paris at last month's Fashion Weeks.  Little House on the Prairie era skills such as canning, carpentry, and spinning are all the rage among hipsters.  And the film the"The Artist" and and the transatlantic Downton Abbey craze, had viewers riveted to big and small screens alike. 

One of my friends wrote about her yearning for "drawing room evenings" on her lovely blog.   The idea of retiring to the drawing room after dinner for cards and conversation seems so much more edifying than my routine of late-- an episode of Midsomer Murders via Netflix on demand and a game of Monopoly on my Android tablet.

But even without the distractions of television and the internet, I wonder if I'd be any more present to the present?  Would a Gaskell novel and a game of Whist in the evenings somehow make me more mindful?  Is nostalgia truly a yearning for a simpler, more attentive life?  Or would I just carry the same habit of inattention into the drawing room?  Although I must say, I do think dressing for dinner would make all the difference in the world. . .

When/how do you feel nostalgic?

Today - Billy Collins Sunday

TODAY
by Billy Collins from Nine Horses (Random House)

If ever there were a spring day so perfect,

so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze

that it made you want to throw

open all the windows in the house

and unlatch the door to the canary's cage,

indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,

a day when the cool brick paths

and the garden bursting with peonies

seemed so etched in sunlight

that you felt like taking

a hammer to the glass paperweight

on the living room end table,

releasing the inhabitants

from their snow-covered cottage

so they could walk out,

holding hands and squinting

into this larger dome of blue and white,

well, today is just that kind of day.

 

    I realize it isn't officially spring yet, but the landscape in the mid-Atlantic doesn't seem to realize that.  Although it's still too early for peonies, the garden is bursting with flashes of yellow-- forsythia, daffodils, crocuses, jonquils.  The cherry blossoms up the street are just starting to open, magnolias are in full bloom, and red buds paint purple splashes among the dark bare oak trees in the woods.  Today is a day for releasing myself to revel in its splendor.  Maybe I'll walk the labyrinth at Brookside Gardens.  Or convince a friend whom I'm meeting for coffee this afternoon that we should get it to go,and take a stroll through my favorite tiny park in Kensington.  Perhaps I'll just have my morning tea on the front porch and sit and watch the traffic and people pass by while pretending to be engrossed in a book.  Today is full of so many possibilities . . .

 

How are you going to release yourself to make the most of it?

 

Lines Lost Among Trees - Billy Collins Sunday

LINES LOST AMONG TREES
by Billy Collins from Picnic, Lightning (University of Pittsburgh Press)

These are not the lines that came to me
while walking in the woods
with no pen
and nothing to write on anyway.
 
They are gone forever,
a handful of coins
dropped through the grate of memory,
along with the ingenious mnemonic
 
I devised to hold them in place-
all gone and forgotten
before I had returned to the clearing of lawn
in back of our quiet house
 
with its jars jammed with pens,
its notebooks and reams of blank paper,
its desk and soft lamp,
its table and the light from its windows.
 
So this is my elegy for them,
those six or eight exhalations,
the braided rope of syntax,
the jazz of the timing,
 
and the little insight at the end
wagging like the short tail
of a perfectly obedient spaniel
sitting by the door.
 
This is my envoy to nothing
where I say Go, little poem-
not out into the world of strangers' eyes,
but off to some airy limbo,
 
home to lost epics,
unremembered names,
and fugitive dreams
such as the one I had last night,

which, like a fantastic city in pencil,
erased itself
in the bright morning air
just as I was waking up.


I'd like to add to the above list of lost things, documents that can't be recovered from hard drives that crash.  Which is what happened to me this morning after I rolled the short distance from my bed to my desk, planning to post before breakfast.  The good news is there are about two weeks left on my laptop warranty so I can pack it up tomorrow and ship it off to be fixed for free.  The bad news is that I discovered that the automatic weekly file back ups I had scheduled stopped running in early February.

It might be better if, like the lines of the poem, I couldn't remember the details of what's been lost.  As I spent a few hours attempting error checks and system recoveries, I worried over what was lost like prayer beads, the strand growing longer as I recalled more work I'd done last month-- the two weeks worth of brainstorming and planning that I neatly organized in on-line notebooks, several days worth of tedious research into grant-giving organizations, a handful of miscellaneous documents.  All lost.

This morning my plan was to announce Billy Collins Sunday-- a day of rest from the usual poem and reflection/question format.  I had a poem picked out and absolutely no reflection or thought provoking questions to offer, just a few stanzas to be enjoyed in and of themselves. 

If you want to still do that, stop reading here and go do something else.  If you want a bit of wisdom, I'll share the lesson I gleaned from this poem and my experience today:  sometimes things are lost and we have to accept it and let them go.

And I will go ahead and offer a question to go along with that:  when was the last time you backed up your work?