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

 

Billy Collins Has an Excellent Point—National Poetry Month 2023

Billy Collins reading in 2008.  His performances are always packed.

Billy Collins is a contemporary American poet best known for his easy accessibility and actually being able to sell his popular collections.  Dubbed “the most popular poet in America” by Bruce Weber in the New York Times, he served two terms as the U.S. Poet Laureate, from 2001-2003.  Poetry and poets are often themes of his verse.  This particular effort is perfect for National Poetry Month and echoes some of my own feelings.

The Effort

Would anyone care to join me
in flicking a few pebbles in the direction
of teachers who are fond of asking the question:
“What is the poet trying to say?”

as if Thomas Hardy and Emily Dickinson
had struggled but ultimately failed in their efforts—
inarticulate wretches that they were,
biting their pens and staring out the window for a clue.

Yes, it seems that Whitman, Amy Lowell
and the rest could only try and fail
but we in Mrs. Parker’s third-period English class
here at Springfield High will succeed

with the help of these study questions
in saying what the poor poet could not,
and we will get all this done before
that orgy of egg salad and tuna fish known as lunch.

Tonight, however, I am the one trying
to say what it is this absence means,
the two of us sleeping and waking under different roofs.
The image of this vase of cut flowers,

not from our garden, is no help.
And the same goes for the single plate,
the solitary lamp, and the weather that presses its face
against these new windows—the drizzle and the
morning frost.

So I will leave it up to Mrs. Parker,
who is tapping a piece of chalk against the blackboard,
and her students—a few with their hands up,
others slouching with their caps on backwards—

to figure out what it is I am trying to say
about this place where I find myself
and to do it before the noon bell rings
and that whirlwind of meatloaf is unleashed.

—Billy Collins

The Effort from Ballistics. © Random House 2008.

 

An Out of Season Christmas Carol from Billy Collins—National Poetry Month 2022

 

Billy Collins reading in 2008.

Billy Collins is one of the best loved and most widely read contemporary American poets.  He was an exceptionally high profile United States Poet Laureate from 2001-03.  He disdains obscurity and embraces a plain spoken, conversational style.  To read, or better yet listen to him read one of his pieces is to feel that you are engaged in a wonderful conversation with a witty friend. His topics are often seemingly mundane, reflecting on ordinary life and its sometimes surprises.  He stands outside any literary movement.  All of this has made him suspect to many academics, some of whom seem to regard widespread popularity with general readers as proof of shallowness.

A Christmas Eve flight over West Texas inspired these musings which would surprise the mostly conservative Christians below him and many of his progressive and sophisticate readers who suspect that the locals are red neck racists.  Thus does a mostly apolitical poet engage both our communal divisions and challenge our smug assumptions.  This verse appeared in Collins’s 2013 Random House collection Aimless Love.

An East Texas Bethlehem from the air.

Flying Over West Texas at Christmas

Oh, little town far below
with a ruler line of a road running through you,
you anonymous cluster of houses and barns,
miniaturized by this altitude
in a land as parched as Bethlehem
might have been somewhere around the year zero—

a beautiful song should be written about you
which choirs could sing in their lofts
and carolers standing in a semicircle
could carol in front of houses topped with snow.

For surely some admirable person was born
within the waffle-iron grid of your streets,
who then went on to perform some small miracles,
placing a hand on the head of a child
or shaking a cigarette out of the pack for a stranger.

But maybe it is best not to compose a hymn
or chisel into tablets the code of his behavior
or convene a tribunal of men in robes to explain his words.

Let us not press the gold leaf of his name
onto a page of vellum or hang his image from a nail.
Better to fly over this little town with nothing
but the hope that someone visits his grave

once a year, pushing open the low iron gate
then making her way toward him
through the rows of the others

before bending to prop up some flowers before the stone.

 

—Billy Collins

 

Billy Collins on Living in the Now—National Poetry Month 2021

In pop culture spirituality living in the now is always sun-drenched and ecstatic.  Not all my moments can live up to this expectation.  But I may be to shallow for the deeper implications.

For at least the last couple of decades the most common spiritual advice must have been some variant on the need to live in the now.  Forget the past, the wisdom goes—you can’t change or do anything about it and you certainly can’t go back to it.  Likewise, don’t dwell on the future—no matter your dreams, no matter how carefully you have planned, there is no way to insure your hopes or on the other hand avoid your greatest dread.  Be content  to be present in the moment you are living now the only time in which your actions or inactions make reality.

The advice is grounded in Buddhist thought and practice but has spread broadly to all sorts of New Age Spirituality, liberal Christianity, some Jews who find similar teaching in the Talmud, and even among the so-called Nones and Brights who ordinarily brook no truck “mystictristic bull shit” and see it as a refutation of prayer and divine intervention and an affirmation that humans hold their lives in their own hands.  Since my own Unitarian Universalists include all of those folks, it is no surprise that it is a regular sermon topic.

In addition to meditation sessions, Sunday services, spiritual essays, and self-help books the message can be found on wall plaques, coffee mugs, and social media memes.

Billy Collins reading in 2008.

All very well and good.  It makes a lot of sense in many ways.  But I have found it somewhat off-putting, perhaps because I am a half-assed historian and sometime memoirist who loves old songs, old books, and old movies.  I am also, or was as a younger man a master of the day dream and spinner of all manner of future glories none of which ever came to pass but were pleasant to contemplate.  But I could not quite put my finger on my discomfort until Billy Collins recently provided me with an ah-haw moment.

Collins is one of the best loved and most widely read contemporary American poets.  He was an exceptionally high profile United States Poet Laureate from 2001-03.  He disdains obscurity and embraces a plain spoken, conversational style.  To read, or better yet listen to him read one of his pieces is to feel that you are engaged in a wonderful conversation with a witty friend. His topics are often seemingly mundane, reflecting on ordinary life and its sometimes surprises.  He stands outside any literary movement.  All of this has made him suspect to many academics, some of whom seem to regard widespread popularity with general readers as proof of shallowness.

But Collins can take those common place topics and give them an unexpected spin often with wry humor.  The Present from his 2016 Random House collection The Rain in Portugal precisely echoed the feelings I had but could not express.  That’s what great poets do.

The Present

Much has been said about being in the present.

It’s the place to be, according to the gurus,

like the latest club on the downtown scene,

but no one, it seems, is able to give you directions.

 

It doesn’t seem desirable or even possible

to wake up every morning and begin

leaping from one second into the next

until you fall exhausted back into bed.

 

Plus, there’d be no past

with so many scenes to savor and regret,

and no future, the place you will die

but not before flying around with a jet-pack.

 

The trouble with the present is

that it’s always in a state of vanishing.

Take the second it takes to end

this sentence with a period––already gone.

 

What about the moment that exists

between banging your thumb

with a hammer and realizing

you are in a whole lot of pain?

What about the one that occurs

after you hear the punch line

but before you get the joke?

Is that where the wise men want us to live

 

in that intervening tick, the tiny slot

that occurs after you have spent hours

searching downtown for that new club

and just before you give up and head back home?

 

            —Billy Collins