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icepixie{Word of warning: This is seriously, unashamedly fangirlish. I mean really. I'm scaring myself a bit here.}
Perhaps this is a sad admission to make as an English major, but to be honest, I've run into realtively few works that really make me sit up and take notice. (I'm thinking here of LMB in general, Connie Willis' Passage, George R. R. Martin, etc.) Now, I had read a few things by Billy Collins (US Poet Laureate 2001-2003), but I hadn't taken a lot of notice of him until this week, when I checked out Nine Horses, which is his most recent collection of poems.
Well.
It usually takes me several days to make it through a book of poetry, but I read this one almost straight through yesterday. I often found myself having to stop for a bit to remember to breathe and get my heart rate down to a decent level. Each poem was better than the last. This man has captured some things that I've spent the last four years and hundreds of pages trying to get right, and usually in a two pages or less. Almost all of the poems are breathtaking in some way--some drift along quietly only to stand up and thwap you in the gut at the end; others have to be taken as a whole, maybe read two or three times, before the scope becomes clear.
This one, for example, is one of the ones that pull you up short at the end.
Ave Atque Vale
Even though I managed to swerve around the lump
of groundhog lying on its back on the road,
he traveled with me for miles,
a quiet passenger
who passed the time looking out the window
enjoying this new view of the woods
he once hobbled around in,
sleeping all day and foraging at night,
rising sometimes to consult the wind with his snout.
Last night he must have wandered
onto the road, hoping to slip
behind the curtain of soft ferns on the other side.
I see these forms every day
and always hope the next one up ahead
is a shredded tire, a discarded brown coat,
but there they are, assuming
every imaginable pose for death's portrait.
This one I speak of, for example,
the one who rode with me for miles,
reminded me of a small Roman citizen,
with his prosperous belly,
his faint smile,
and his one still forearm raised
as if he were still alive, still hailing Caesar.
From Big Snap.
And this one is one that creeps up on you throughout each line, until you wonder why you never saw that before. (Or, if you're like me, why you couldn't string these words together when you were trying to write about this!)
Velocity
In the club car that morning I had my notebook
open on my lap and my pen uncapped,
looking every inch the writer
right down to the little writer’s frown on my face,
but there was nothing to write
about except life and death
and the low warning sound of the train whistle.
I did not want to write about the scenery
that was flashing past, cows spread over a pasture,
hay rolled up meticulously--
things you see once and will never see again.
But I kept my pen moving by drawing
over and over again
the face of a motorcyclist in profile--
for no reason I can think of--
a biker with sunglasses and a weak chin,
leaning forward, helmetless,
his long thin hair trailing behind him in the wind.
I also drew many lines to indicate speed,
to show the air becoming visible
as it broke over the biker’s face
the way it was breaking over the face
of the locomotive that was pulling me
toward Omaha and whatever lay beyond Omaha
for me and all the other stops to make
before the time would arrive to stop for good.
We must always look at things
from the point of view of eternity,
the college theologians used to insist,
from which, I imagine, we would all
appear to have speed lines trailing behind us
as we rush along the road of the world,
as we rush down the long tunnel of time--
the biker, of course, drunk on the wind,
but also the man reading by a fire,
speed lines coming off his shoulders and his book,
and the woman standing on a beach
studying the curve of horizon,
even the child asleep on a summer night,
speed lines flying from the posters of her bed,
from the white tips of the pillowcases,
and from the edges of her perfectly motionless body.
From MSNBC.
This one, as well, is what I mean about slowly building up until it's ingrained itself into your psyche: On Turning Ten.
I think part of the reason I instantly fell in love with everything in this volume is the musicality of the lines and stanzas. Not that any of them could necessarily be turned into songs, but these are poems that command you to read them out loud, or at least under your breath, instead of silently in your head. Like this one, which I read to the cat because I couldn't contain myself:
Lying in a Bed in the Dark,
I Silently Address the Birds of Arizona
Oh, birds of Arizona,
who woke me yesterday with your excited chirping,
where do you go to die?
So many of you, and yet never a trace
of your expirations,
no lump of feathers happened upon
here on the pavement
or another there on a square of lawn.
Are you down in the scrub turning in circles?
Do you tilt and fall on your side?
Do you lie there breathing among the warm rocks,
lie there breathing,
lie there
as the moon rises,
as the members of your flock fall silent for the night,
and the earth revolves around the center of your tiny eye?
Now, lest anyone think this guy is the most depressing writer on Earth, he's actually known for his comedic poems. Like this one about Smokey the Bear, called "Flames". Or "Nostalgia", which made me cackle, and then suddenly stop and catch my breath at the end.
All right, I'm done with the fangirling for now. But check this guy out. There are several poems from his earlier volumes online here, and probably more if you Google the guy or read the excerpts at Amazon.
Perhaps this is a sad admission to make as an English major, but to be honest, I've run into realtively few works that really make me sit up and take notice. (I'm thinking here of LMB in general, Connie Willis' Passage, George R. R. Martin, etc.) Now, I had read a few things by Billy Collins (US Poet Laureate 2001-2003), but I hadn't taken a lot of notice of him until this week, when I checked out Nine Horses, which is his most recent collection of poems.
Well.
It usually takes me several days to make it through a book of poetry, but I read this one almost straight through yesterday. I often found myself having to stop for a bit to remember to breathe and get my heart rate down to a decent level. Each poem was better than the last. This man has captured some things that I've spent the last four years and hundreds of pages trying to get right, and usually in a two pages or less. Almost all of the poems are breathtaking in some way--some drift along quietly only to stand up and thwap you in the gut at the end; others have to be taken as a whole, maybe read two or three times, before the scope becomes clear.
This one, for example, is one of the ones that pull you up short at the end.
Ave Atque Vale
Even though I managed to swerve around the lump
of groundhog lying on its back on the road,
he traveled with me for miles,
a quiet passenger
who passed the time looking out the window
enjoying this new view of the woods
he once hobbled around in,
sleeping all day and foraging at night,
rising sometimes to consult the wind with his snout.
Last night he must have wandered
onto the road, hoping to slip
behind the curtain of soft ferns on the other side.
I see these forms every day
and always hope the next one up ahead
is a shredded tire, a discarded brown coat,
but there they are, assuming
every imaginable pose for death's portrait.
This one I speak of, for example,
the one who rode with me for miles,
reminded me of a small Roman citizen,
with his prosperous belly,
his faint smile,
and his one still forearm raised
as if he were still alive, still hailing Caesar.
From Big Snap.
And this one is one that creeps up on you throughout each line, until you wonder why you never saw that before. (Or, if you're like me, why you couldn't string these words together when you were trying to write about this!)
Velocity
In the club car that morning I had my notebook
open on my lap and my pen uncapped,
looking every inch the writer
right down to the little writer’s frown on my face,
but there was nothing to write
about except life and death
and the low warning sound of the train whistle.
I did not want to write about the scenery
that was flashing past, cows spread over a pasture,
hay rolled up meticulously--
things you see once and will never see again.
But I kept my pen moving by drawing
over and over again
the face of a motorcyclist in profile--
for no reason I can think of--
a biker with sunglasses and a weak chin,
leaning forward, helmetless,
his long thin hair trailing behind him in the wind.
I also drew many lines to indicate speed,
to show the air becoming visible
as it broke over the biker’s face
the way it was breaking over the face
of the locomotive that was pulling me
toward Omaha and whatever lay beyond Omaha
for me and all the other stops to make
before the time would arrive to stop for good.
We must always look at things
from the point of view of eternity,
the college theologians used to insist,
from which, I imagine, we would all
appear to have speed lines trailing behind us
as we rush along the road of the world,
as we rush down the long tunnel of time--
the biker, of course, drunk on the wind,
but also the man reading by a fire,
speed lines coming off his shoulders and his book,
and the woman standing on a beach
studying the curve of horizon,
even the child asleep on a summer night,
speed lines flying from the posters of her bed,
from the white tips of the pillowcases,
and from the edges of her perfectly motionless body.
From MSNBC.
This one, as well, is what I mean about slowly building up until it's ingrained itself into your psyche: On Turning Ten.
I think part of the reason I instantly fell in love with everything in this volume is the musicality of the lines and stanzas. Not that any of them could necessarily be turned into songs, but these are poems that command you to read them out loud, or at least under your breath, instead of silently in your head. Like this one, which I read to the cat because I couldn't contain myself:
Lying in a Bed in the Dark,
I Silently Address the Birds of Arizona
Oh, birds of Arizona,
who woke me yesterday with your excited chirping,
where do you go to die?
So many of you, and yet never a trace
of your expirations,
no lump of feathers happened upon
here on the pavement
or another there on a square of lawn.
Are you down in the scrub turning in circles?
Do you tilt and fall on your side?
Do you lie there breathing among the warm rocks,
lie there breathing,
lie there
as the moon rises,
as the members of your flock fall silent for the night,
and the earth revolves around the center of your tiny eye?
Now, lest anyone think this guy is the most depressing writer on Earth, he's actually known for his comedic poems. Like this one about Smokey the Bear, called "Flames". Or "Nostalgia", which made me cackle, and then suddenly stop and catch my breath at the end.
All right, I'm done with the fangirling for now. But check this guy out. There are several poems from his earlier volumes online here, and probably more if you Google the guy or read the excerpts at Amazon.
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no subject
Date: 2004-07-08 07:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-07-08 11:02 pm (UTC)