The Great American Poem by Billy Collins—National Poetry Month 2024

 

Billy Collins reading in 2008.

Billy Collins is probably the most accessible and popular working poet in the U.S. and yet still gets respect by serious critics, cultural guardians, and awards panels.   His work is transparent, straight forward, conversational, personal, and often wry.

He was the U.S. Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2003, and is the author of many collections of verse, including Questions About Angels from Pittsburgh in1999 and Aimless Love form Random House in 2013. His many honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation and the Poetry Foundation’s Mark Twain Award for Humor in Poetry.

 

The Great American Poem

If this were a novel,

it would begin with a character,

a man alone on a southbound train

or a young girl on a swing by a farmhouse.

 

And as the pages turned, you would be told

that it was morning or the dead of night,

and I, the narrator, would describe

for you the miscellaneous clouds over the farmhouse

 

and what the man was wearing on the train

right down to his red tartan scarf,

and the hat he tossed onto the rack above his head,

as well as the cows sliding past his window.

 

Eventually—one can only read so fast—

you would learn either that the train was bearing

the man back to the place of his birth

or that he was headed into the vast unknown,

 

and you might just tolerate all of this

as you waited patiently for shots to ring out

in a ravine where the man was hiding

or for a tall, raven-haired woman to appear in a doorway.

 

But this is a poem, not a novel,

and the only characters here are you and I,

alone in an imaginary room

which will disappear after a few more lines,

 

leaving us no time to point guns at one another

or toss all our clothes into a roaring fireplace.

I ask you: who needs the man on the train

and who cares what his black valise contains?

 

We have something better than all this turbulence

lurching toward some ruinous conclusion.

I mean the sound that we will hear

as soon as I stop writing and put down this pen.

 

I once heard someone compare it

to the sound of crickets in a field of wheat

or, more faintly, just the wind

over that field stirring things that we will never see.

 

—Billy Collins