Billy Collins

He sounds like he should be playing second base for the Red Sox – Billy Collins. As it turns out he’s a poet. Now I have been a reader for close to five decades, ever since some kid lent me The Lord of the Flies. But in all that time, I’ve never really enjoyed or appreciated poetry. Even with the guidance of my man Bloom, who reawakened my interest in the classics, and who was clearly willing to take me step by step through the canonical poets, I never seemed to get much out of it. I did read Leaves of Grass, much of it aloud to John when he was an infant. Here he was, all of six days old, and I was reading him I Sing the Body Electric. But I only remember that poem because it had such a great title. And after much work, I guess I was able to appreciate Whitman’s masterpiece , When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed, but would I reread it for sheer enjoyment, the way I might watch Casablanca for the seventy-fifth time? I don’t think so.

Anyway, my friend Steve stopped by one night to have a couple scotches, and brought this little book of poetry, from which he read aloud. At first I thought that Steve was slightly off his rocker, because, really, Poetry? But after the whisky, and after Steve and the lovely Sheila had gone home, and I spent some time alone with the book – it’s entitled Sailing Alone Around the World, and is sort of a greatest hits volume -- I was amazed to find how much I enjoyed the guy.

Collins is at his best when his poems are about nothing much at all, just a different way of looking at things. There is a zany, absurdist element in many of the early poems that I found most enjoyable. And he tells us about his unpretentious approach in one of his earlier poems, entitled, appropriately, Introduction to Poetry:

………..

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.

…………

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.

Later in life, whether he felt the weight of having been selected Poet Laureate, or just because he was older and saw life slipping away, his stuff became heavier, more serious, darker, less fun. I was making a list of all the poems I wanted to go back and reread, and I found that as time passed, I was adding fewer and fewer poems to the list. Maybe they were just as good, but I didn’t feel like reading about loss and death. Or maybe as a serious poet, he just didn’t feel like he could write about some dog barking his way through Beethoven’s Seventh, and ending up in the orchestra, in the oboe section. Maybe when you’re a serious poet laureate, you just can’t write that kind of goofy stuff any more.

Anyway, when this blog opened in 2005, one of its topics was supposed to be the essays of Michel de Montaigne. Over the years, whisky and baseball have pretty much squeezed literature off the page. But I’m glad to be able to return to that subject every now and then. And I was really glad to have found, at this advanced age, that there was something new and different for me to enjoy. Thanks Steve.