billy collins 2019 live reading

well it's great to be back and I thank you thank you all for coming willingly or unwillingly they're at a poetry reading there are always a few people that are dragged along and they're pretty easy to spot but but I can issue if you are one of those I can pretty much guarantee that this will not be as bad as you thought maybe at moments it'll under underline here were suspicious but generally speaking no so I'd love to tell you more about what I've been doing since we last met but one of the things I did in January of this year in conjunction with the 92nd Street Y in New York which is the kind of premiere place for readings and has been since the 1950s really is I curated and then presented an evening that we call the listening room and I had at my disposal the the all the tapes the archives of all the readings since 1950 one of the comings while Stevens yes Elliott all the big guns and some little air guns and so I picked some of those poems and introduced them and of course everybody wanted to hear Dylan Thomas because of his kind of oratorical and sonorous delivery and I'd heard about this but i listening to the tapes was there was the evidence that Dylan Thomas was in the habit of before he read his own poems he would read spend quite a bit of time maybe 20 minutes half an hour reading the poems of others of all sorts of different poets and so I thought this evening that I would definitely not do that I just wanted to reassure you one of the the beginning of this reading has the kind of motive Venice I wanted to correct a misconception the misconception is that my persona in other words this speaking voice that I more or less and concocted is a homebody does not get out much someone called me and I guess him an indoor nature poet because he gets over to the window could and that's that's a great window you have to look at out there in this excellent weather but the door is another issue it's a little too much for him to get outdoors well this is all wrong and I wanted to read some poems that that back up that in that position and correct that misperception but I have to say that I have partially responsible for encouraging that image I have a book called sailing alone around the room which gives you a kind of claustrophobic feeling already and and I wanted to I'm just going to plead guilty in the beginning and read a another poem that secures my personas position as as essentially an indoor agoraphobic entity and the poem is called fishing on the Susquehanna and July I have never been fishing on the Susquehanna or on any River for that matter to be perfectly honest not in July or any month have I had the pleasure if it is a pleasure of fishing on the Susquehanna I am more likely to be found in a quiet room like this one a painting of a woman on the wall a bowl of tangerines on the table trying to manufacture the sensation of fishing on the Susquehanna there is a little doubt others have been fishing on the Susquehanna rowing upstream in a wooden boat sliding the oars under the water then raising them to drip in the light but the nearest I have ever come to fishing on the Susquehanna was one afternoon in a museum in Philadelphia when I balanced the little egg of time in front of a painting in which that River curled around a bend under a blue cloud ruffled sky dense trees along the banks and a fellow with a red bandanna sitting in a small green flat bottomed boat holding the thin whip of a pole that is something I am unlikely to ever to do I remember saying to myself and the person next to me then I blinked and move on to other American paintings of haystacks water whitening over rocks even one of a brown hair who seems so wired with alertness I imagined him springing right out of the frame so that's thank you well how is he supposed to get outdoors he's riding all the time for one thing and here's another one where I you can see me cultivating this on this indoor image it's called Budapest see just like fishing in the Susquehanna the title is promising Budapest my pen moves along the page like the snout of a strange animal like an anteater shaped like a human arm and dressed in the sleeve of a loose green sweater I watch it sniffing the paper as ceaselessly intent as any forager that has nothing on its mind but the grubs and insects that it will allow it to live another day it wants only to be here tomorrow dressed perhaps in this leave of a plaid shirt NOAA's pressed against the page writing a few more dutiful lines while I gaze out the window and imagine Budapest or some other city where I have never been and thank you and here is a poem called safe travels and which is that kind of renunciation of travel but we'll get to the other person in a minute it has the word snood in it that's a something that women used to a little hair net that women would have snood men men are wearing these today in some in some places unaware that it they're called snoods I'm not going to tell them safe travels every time Gulliver travels into another chapter of Gulliver's Travels I Marvel out how well-traveled he is despite his incurable gullibility I don't enjoy traveling anymore because for instance I still don't know the difference between a bloke and a chap and I'm embarrassed whenever I have to hold out a palm of loose coins to a cashier as if I were feeding a pigeon in the park like Proust I see only trouble in store if I leave my room which is not lined with cork only sheets of wallpaper featuring orange flowers and little green vines of course anytime I want I can travel in my imagination but only as far as Toronto where some graduate students with goatees and snooze are translating my poems into Canadian but here we find so now we're gonna hit the road here a little bit now we find myself or my Cressona in an in Italy and the poem is called I am NOT Italian so there's another problem right now I am NOT Italian I am NOT Italian technically speaking yet here I am leaning on a zinc bar in Perugia on a sunny weekday morning my foot up on the iron railing just like the other men who it must be said are officially and fully Italian it's 8:40 and they are off to work some in office offices others sweeping the stupid streets well I am off to a museum or a church to see paintings maybe light a candle in an alcove yet here we all are in our suits and work shirts joined in the Brotherhood of espresso or how is it said love froth Alonza does press Oh draining our little white cups with an artful rotation of the wrist each of us tasting the same sweetness of life if you take a little sugar and the bitterness of its brevity whether you choose to take sugar or not our good friend John wolf is here and he can attest that I was across the border and was in Mexico a while back and and he was my host our hosts there and the poem that came out of it is called the Symphony Orchestra of san miguel de allende the symphony orchestra of san miguel de allende is not made up of the usual instruments instead of brass strings and woodwinds there are church bells roosters doves and barking dogs all of which predate the horn the violin and the oboe notably the rooster who crowed even before the time of Christ the orchestra plays all day and into the night but the music is most vibrant in the early morning when much of the audience is still in bed and not distracted by their jobs and errands as they will be later in the day at first as I listened from my canopy bed it sounded like a noisy riot of nonsense until I pictured a gigantic score written centuries ago by the Mozart of Mexico the same genius who decided those dogs should come in just after the 32 gongs of a solemn Bell who had the doves modulate into an Adagio and who added a rest here and there where the rooster should pause but not for long are we not all seekers of order I thought as when we examine the lines in our palms or connect the dots of the star is to form a bear in the sky then why not lie here a little longer before rising from our slumber to ponder the great meaning of this composition for dogs roosters doves and bells the dogs are barking to be fed the roosters are beckoning us to the henhouse where three eggs are still warm in the straw but the doves are mourning our losses and the bells are there to remind us of God thank you and my persona has been to Idaho which I will now prove to you so this this is a poem called Elk River Falls its Falls in Idaho and it starts out by saying the Elk River Falls is where the Elk River Falls and it continues and it tries to follow the progress of an actual waterfall of its stages or it's just continuation of itself and the poem is one stands and it's also one sentence because you know waterfalls don't come in stanzas and periods they don't punctuation they just keep going so I wanted to make the feeling of the poem continuous and it's in a kind of rough to tram it or beat Elk River Falls is where the Elk River Falls from a rocky and considerable height turning pale with trepidation at the lip it seemed from where I stood below before it unbuckles from itself and plummets shredded through the air into the shadows of a frigid pool so calm around the edges a place for water to recover from the shock of falling apart and coming back together before it picks up its song again goes gliding around some massive rocks and past some islands overgrown with weeds then flattens out slips around a bend and continues on its winding course according to this campers guide then joins the Clearwater at its northern Fork which leads it all to the distance see where this and every other stream mistakes the monster for itself sings its name one final time then feels the sudden sting of salt sort of the biography of a waterfall and there well there are disappointments in travel as we know someone pointed out land of Bhutan I think that the the Travel Writers never tell you how bored you're gonna be when you get there [Music] that's always it omitted I guess because it's your own damn fault if you're not stimulated and this is a problem of of heat so we went to my then wife and I went to Palermo I sounded like a good idea go to Sicily but we went in August when it's like 40 you know 40 degrees Celsius and it can do strange things for your your mind to your mind and this is about a kind of mental Distortion Palermo it was full of foolish of us to leave our room the empty Plaza was shimmering the clock looked ready to melt the heat was a mallet striking a ball and sending it bouncing into the nettles of summer even the bees had knocked off for the day the only thing moving besides us and we had since stopped under an awning was a squirrel who was darting this way and that as if you were having second thoughts about crossing the empty street his head and tail twitching with indecision you were looking in a shop window but I was watching the squirrel who now rose up on his hind legs and after pausing to look in all directions began to sing in a beautiful voice a melancholy aria about life and death his forepaws clutched against his chest his face full of longing and hope as the Sun beat down on the roofs and the awnings of the city and the earth continued to turn and hold in its position the moon which would appear later that night as we sat in a cafe and I stood up on the table with the encouragement of the owner and saying for you and the others the song the squirrel had taught me how does I know eponymous is okay it's good when I I feel that after I finish it the attendant is are coming to take me for my walk on the grounds of this sanatorium somewhere well timing is important in in travel and this poem is points that out it's called the sandhill cranes of Nebraska another state the sandhill cranes of Nebraska too bad you weren't here six months ago was a lament I heard on my visit to Nebraska you could have seen the astonishing spectacle of a sandhill cranes thousands of them feeding and even dancing on the shores of the Platte River there was no point in pointing out the impossibility of my being there then because I happened to be somewhere else so I nodded and put on a look of mild disappointment if only to be part of the commiseration it was the same look I remember wearing about six months ago in Georgia when I was told that I had just missed a spectacular annual outburst of azaleas brilliant against the green backdrop of spring and the same in Vermont six months before that when I arrived shortly after the magnificent foliage had gloriously peaked Mother Nature as she is called having touched the hills with her many colored brush a phenomenon that occurs like the others around the same time every year when I am apparently off in another state stuck in a motel lobby with the local paper and a Styrofoam cup of coffee busily missing God knows why and now there's a word for this it was made up I don't know if you know the great poet Howard Nemiroff who was actually a poet laureate in his time and he he made up a he was one of a number of writers who were asked to make up a word that doesn't exist one that will fill a hole in the language sir we have to perceive a need for a hole for a word and so his word was a verb the verb is to is a liate to as Eliot means to commiserate needlessly with a guest about a natural phenomenon that there they they just missed or or they're going to miss because they're leaving too early so you have been probably been as a Liautaud yourselves and this is another travel poem about disorientation Malcolm Lowry who was a fairly adventurous traveler said the Travie traveling from one from one country or country to another country was leaving a place to which you bore a little relationship and going to a place to which you had no relationship whatsoever this is called bash oh well the well-known Japanese haiku master bath show in Ireland another problem excuse me bass Joe and Ireland I am like the Japanese poet who longed to be in Kyoto even though he was already in Kyoto I am NOT exactly like him because I am NOT Japanese and I have no idea what Kyoto is like but once while walking through the Irish town of Bali Vaughan I caught myself longing to be in Bali Vaughan the sensation of being homesick for a place that is not my home while being right in the middle of it was particularly strong when I passed the hotel bar then the fluorescent depth of a launderette also when I stood at the crossroads with the roadsides pointing in three directions and the enormous bus is making their turn it might have had something to do with the nearby limestone hills and the rain collecting on my collar but then again I have longed to be with a number of people while the two of us are sitting in the same room on an ordinary evening without limestone or thousand thousands of miles from Kyoto and the simple wonders of Bali Vaughan which reminds me of another Japanese poet who wrote how much he enjoyed not being able to see his favorite mountain because of all the fog so one more Irish poem to things that this illustrates one is that my persona made it to Ireland and the other is that he and I have very little experience with farm life I was born and raised in New York City and he was - I guess so afternoon with Irish cows there were a few dozen who occupied the field across the road from where we lived stepping all day from tough - tuft their big heads down in the soft grass though I would sometimes pass a window and look out to see the field suddenly empty as if they had taken Wayne flown off to another County but later I would open the blue front door and again the field would be full of their munching or they would be lying down on the black-and-white maps of their sides facing in all directions waiting for rain how mysterious how patient and dumbfounded they appeared in the long quiet of the afternoons but every once in a while one of them would let out a sound so phenomenal that I would put down the paper or the knife I was cutting an apple with and walk across the road to the stone wall to see which one of them was being torched or pierced through the side with a long spear yes it sounded like pain until I could see the noisy one anchored there on all fours her neck outstretched her bellowing head laboring upward as she gave voice to the rising full-bodied cry that began in the darkness of her belly and echoed up through her bowed ribs into her gaping mouth then I knew that she was only announcing the large unadulterated countess of herself pouring out from the ancient apologia of her kind to all the green fields and the gray clouds to the limestone hills and the inlet of the Blue Bay while she regarded my head and shoulders above the wall with one wild shocking eye you know cows if they look at you sideways and then a lot of the white of the eye is exposed that's I find that frightening it's like the the cow is thinking if I had horns I would be right over there take care of you young man okay Jay this is a poem called January in Paris and I'll stop driving this point point home shortly although maybe you're in drought during the travel log aspect of the evening January in Paris well I I have never been to Paris in January I have to admit but my persona has so that's what we're talking about here there's a mmm there's an epigraph to the to the poem and it's a little quote that's overused in workshops when people say you know we're talking about how do you end a poem how do you know you're done and it's a boat it's a quote from the French poet Paul valéry who said poems are never completed they're only abandoned and I take issue with that I finished my poems I know it if if I abandon them i banned them right into the wastebasket and the the ending of a poem is usually the hardest part you want to find a place where I want to find a place where I don't want to say anymore you don't want to hear anymore we have complete agreement on that you know if nothing else the probe ended [Music] that's one reason Philip Larkin didn't didn't attend poetry readings he said he couldn't he couldn't you couldn't tell when the poems gonna end he didn't like that it made him jumpy you know when you hold up the poem in your hand you can see the ending coming up visually and you can make emotional preparations for that but you know it can I can stop anywhere sometimes it's like some of those movies we all what a great ending and then oh this another scene that would have been a great ending well here's January in Paris and it answers that thing about poems being abandoned not completed that winter I had nothing to do but tend the kettle in my shuttered room on the top floor of a Pensione near a cemetery but I was sometimes descend the stairs unlock my bicycle and pedal along the cold city streets often turning from a wide Boulevard down a narrow side street bearing the name of an obscure patriot I followed a few private rules never crossing a bridge without stopping midpoint to lean my bike on the railing and observe the flow of the river below as I tried to better understand the French in my pale coat and my bass cap I pedaled past the windows of a patisserie or sat up tall in the seat arms folded and clicked downhill filling my nose with winter air I would see beggars and street cleaners in their bright uniforms and sometimes I would see the poems of Valerie the ones he never finished but a bit and wandering the streets of the city have closed most of them needed only a final line or two a little verbal flourish at the end but whenever I approach they would retreat from there a scan fires into the shadows thin specters of incompletion forsaken for so many decades how would they ever trust another man with a pen I came across the one I wanted to tell you about sitting with a glass of Rose a at a cafe table beautiful met emaciated unfinished cruelly abandoned with a flicker panache by Monsieur Paul Valery himself big fish in the school of symbolism and for a time president of the Committee of Arts and Letters of the League of Nations if you please never mind how I got her out of the cafe past the concierge and up the flights of stairs remember that Paris is the capital of public kissing and never mind the holding and the pressing it is enough to know that I moved my pen in such a way as to bring her to completion a simple final stanza which ended as this poem will with the image of a gorgeous orphan lying on a rumpled bed her large eyes closed a painting of cows in a valley over her head and off to the side me in a window seat blowing smoke from a cigarette at dawn and working it and see and the intentional intentionally travel travel log with a poem which is celebrates staying home so we're back to zero and it was written after a trip to a little trip to Europe had to be canceled and the summer was spent in the suburbs of New York instead and it's called consolation how agreeable it is not to be touring Italy this summer wandering her cities and it's sending her to her tour at hilltowns how much better to cruise these local familiar streets fully grasping the meaning of every road sign in billboard and all the sudden hand gestures of my compatriots there are are no Abbey's 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 and phrase books and wrinkled maps why feat scenery into a hungry one-eyed camera eager to eat the world one monument at a time instead of slouching in a cafe 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 away and after breakfast I will not have to find someone willing to photograph me with my arm around the owner I 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 great thank you nothing wrong with Bologna yet but like a lot of places it's not wrong a poem called walking my 75 year old dog another again immediate problem arises of credibility but that will be straightened out in the poem walking my 75 year old dog she's painfully slow so I often have to stop and wait for her to study and sniff some roadside weeds as if she were reading the biography of a famous dog and she's not a pretty sight anymore dragging one of her hind legs her coat too matted to brush or comb and a snout white as a marshmallow we usually walk down a disused road that runs along the edge of a lake whose surface trembles in a high wind in a slow to iced over as the months grow cold we don't walk very far before she sits down on her Warren haunches and looks up at me with her roomy eyes then it's time to carry her back to the car just thinking about the honesty in her eyes I realized I should tell you she's really not 75 she's 14 I guess I was trying to appeal to your sense of the bizarre the curiosities of the sideshow I mean who really cares about another person's dog everything else I've said is true except the part about her being 14 I mean she's old but not that old and it's not nice to divulge the age of a true lady maybe I've read this two years ago about the poem about Tennessee fainting coats I don't know if that 2 years is enough time to forget a lot of things I mean by the time you get to your cars I wouldn't want to have to you know have you remember what you hear it here well also I'll read this history fresher memories Tennessee fainting goats are a phenomenon as you might know and you can see them do their thing if that's the word for on YouTube I only heard about this fairly recently and immediately wanted to get this down the poem excuse me the poem is called down on the farm well I should say the Tennessee Tennessee fainting goats they they live up to every part of the three parts of their name that's all you need to know about down on the farm whenever the conversation turns to the subject of Tennessee fainting goats the question that always comes up is why are they so squeamish that they faint like Victorian ladies whenever the farmer uses language on becoming a gentleman or is it catching one code faint one goat fainting because he sees another one fainting but that still leaves open the question of what makes the first goat faint does the memory of having keeled over one morning make one keel over again are they in love or is it all just too much no one seems to know for sure but it's something to think about when I'm trying to get to sleep at night or when I'm looking at a window at the barn and the fenced-in pastures to see a goat stiffen before pitching over on its side with a thump is truly unnerving but when he rises in a minute or two as if from the dead and goes back to munching with his head down in the sweet grass on these hillsides then everything seems okay again just like before that's a good example you didn't want to hear anymore I didn't want to say anymore we're fine wait go on stop your here's a poem called the garland the garland I would like a sort of like a last wish this thing or something the garland I would like to be laid to rest in a big tomb topped by a stone figure of an angel who appears to have landed there in order to sob forever her face buried in her bent arm one folded wing hanging by her side then whenever I found the time to visit my own grave after approaching with slow respectful steps I would place around her rough neck a garland of wildflowers that I knitted then run back to the car laughing and immortal [Applause] it's the return of silliness to poetry which has been absent now here's a poem that arose out of reading lately thing through Elizabeth bishops big collected poems and she has two poems I wasn't really familiar with thereon facing pages and one is one is titled sleeping on the ceiling and the other is titled sleeping standing up and fair enough but I I thought I would respond to this more sensibly with a poem called sleeping on my side and it's a it's a song it's a sonnet also sleeping on my side every night no matter where I am when I lie down I turned my back on half the world at home it's the east I ignore with its theatres and silverware as I face the adventurous West but when I'm on the road in some hotels room 213 or 402 I could be pointed anywhere yet I hardly care as young as long as you are there facing the other way so we are defended in all degrees and my left ear is pressing down as if listening for hoofbeats in the ground okay well we're not now at this point we're not going anywhere he reassured the audience here's a poem that is it's not really about cereal but it certainly involves cereal it's called cheer it's called Cheerios this is quite autobiographical Cheerios unlike all the others Cheerios one bright morning in a restaurant in Chicago as I waited for my eggs and toast I opened the Tribune only to discover that I was the same age as furio's indeed I was a few months older than Cheerios for today the newspaper announced was the 70th birthday of Cheerios whereas mine had occurred earlier in the year already I could hear them whispering behind my stooped and threadbare back why that dudes older than Cheerios the way they used to say why that's as old as the hills only the hills are much older than Cheerios or any American breakfast cereal and more noble and enduring are the hills I surmised as a bar of sunlight illuminated my orange juice Thanks how are we doing here we're good so we'd have a little maybe a little question and answer at the end if you like silence deepened when you're when you're when you give readings you have a you know you can feel the different kinds of silences you sometimes in the middle of a poem and it's a good sign if a poem gets really good some ambient noise sound sound people know this right this called room noise is that what you call it it's the it's the noise the room is making you have like 150 200 people here or whatever any little noises are being made but and often in a good part of a poem or even after the end of a poem it becomes really silent that that cuts out and that's that's good so I encourage you to so this is a poem in which an adult is talking to a an adolescent and that's always a dicey dicey situation someone said I think this is absolutely true never try to teach in it never try to cheer up a teenager you'll make matters worse immediately they don't want to be cheered up they want to just they want to sulk it's fine it's what they're doing it's what they're designed to do someone else said the the idea of childhood is not to grow up the idea is to be a good child all right that really hit home with me just be a good child wealth rest will take care of itself so this is called - my favorite 17 year old high school girl do you realize that a few it started building the Parthenon on the day you were born you would be all done in only one more year of course you couldn't have done that alone so never mind you're fine just as you are your love for simply being yourself but did you know that at your age Judy Garland was pulling down 150,000 dollars a picture Joan of Arc was leading the French army to victory and Blaise Pascal had cleaned up his room no wait he's the one who invented the calculator of course there will be time for all that later in your life after you come out of your room and begin to blossom or at least pick up all your socks for some reason I keep remembering that Lady Jane Grey was queen of England which he was only 50 and but then she was beheaded so never mind her as a role model but a few centuries later when he was your age franz schubert was doing the dishes for his family but that did not keep him from composing two symphonies four operas and to complete masses as a youngster but of course that was in Austria at the height of romantic lyricism not here in the suburbs of Cleveland frankly who cares if Annie Oakley was a crack shot at 15 or Maria Callas debuted tasks at 17 we think you're a special but just being you playing with your food and staring into space by the way I lied about Schubert doing the dishes but that doesn't mean he never helped out around the house two poems about dogs in both of them the dog is speaking or the first one actually the dog is just thinking and we're overhearing the dog somehow thinking and it's this is just 12 loins and the dog is thinking what the dog is thinking about is his master what else is there to think I'm sure there other things but in this case we catch the dog thinking about his master a dog on his master as young as I look I am growing older faster than he 7 to 1 is the ratio they tend to say whatever the number I will pass him one day and take the lead the way I do honor walks in the woods and if this ever manages to cross his mind it would be the Swedish shadow I have ever cast on snow or grass ok well this is another entirely different that's quite a quite an intelligent pup there and that one but this is another another breed of dog you might say and the poem is called I wanted to write a poem in which there is some intention behind this one as the other one's a little more drifty unless you are nodding with agreement but I wanted to write a poem about a pet dog that was free of sentimentality as the other one was not so the poem is called the revenant okay the revenant I am the dog you put to sleep as you like to call the needle of oblivion come back to tell you this simple thing I never liked you when I licked your face I thought of biting off your nose when I watched you telling yourself dry I wanted to leap and unmanned you with a snap I resented the way you moved your lack of animal grace the way it was sit in a chair to eat and napkin on your lap and knife in your hand I would have run away but I was too weak a trick you taught me while I was learning to sit and heal and greatest of insults shake hands without a hand I admit the sight of the leash would excite me but only because it meant I was about to smell things you had never touched you do not want to believe this but I have no reason to lie I hated the car hated the rubber toys disliked your friends and worse your relatives the jingling of my tags drove me mad you always scratched me in the wrong place all I ever wanted from you was food and fresh water and my metal balls while you slept I watched you breathe as the moon rose in the sky it took all of my strength not to raise my head and how old now I am free of the colour free of the yellow raincoat monogrammed sweater the absurdity of your lawn and that is all you need to know about this place except what you're already supposed and are glad that did not happen sooner that everyone here can read and write the dogs in poetry the cats and all the others in prose well let's see there's quite a bit of gold left here but let's see I'll just read it I'm just sort of start to end here want to read this poem about what something like children do in the summertime at camp and that is make lanyards and we'll be hitting in about two months we'll be hitting the high-water mark for a lanyard production and camps camps all over America furiously children are at work creating these things so the lanyard and I'm I've been telling you about the genesis of some of these poems and in this poem I that's the first stanza tells you how it came to be the lanyard the other day as I was ricocheting slowly off the pale blue walls of this room bouncing from typewriter to piano from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor I found myself in the L section of the dictionary where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard no cookie nibbled by our French novelist could send one more suddenly into the past a past where I sat at a work bench at a camp by a deep Adirondack lake learning how to braid thin plastic strips into a lanyard a gift from my mother I had never seen anyone used a lanyard or wear one if that's what you did with them but that did not keep me from crossing strand over strand again and again until I had made a boxy red and white lanyard for my mother she gave me life and milk from her breasts and I gave her a lanyard she nursed me and many a sickroom lifted teaspoons of medicine to my lips set cold face cloths on my forehead and then led me out into the airy light and taught me to walk and swim and I in turn presented her with a lanyard here are thousands of meals she said and here is clothing and a good education and here is your lanyard I replied which I made with a little help from a counselor here is a breathing body and a beating heart strong legs bones and teeth and two clear eyes to read the world she whispered and here I said is the lanyard I made a kill and here I wish to say to her now is a smaller gift not the Archaic truth that you can never repay your mother but the rueful admission that when she took the 2-tone lanyard from my hands I was as sure as a boy could be that this useless worthless thing I wove out of boredom would be enough to make us even [Applause] every two very short poems and then a final tone and the this this little short poem is connected sort of back to the seventeen-year-old who is now all grown up it's called oh my god and it's only nine lines long oh my god exclamation point very naive speaker you'll see oh my god not only in church and nightly by their bed sides two young girls pray these days wherever they go prayer is woven into their talk like a bright thread of awe even at the pedestrian mall outbursts of praise spring unbidden from their glossy lips [Music] and and the other ones not so funny it's called divorce and it's it's only four lines long it could have been longer but divorce once two spoons in bed now tine Forks across a granite table and the knives they have hired okay talking about mixed reactions Bueller Bueller groaning applauding oh oh okay soon was yelling at me over there yeah I want to close with this poem I'll just find it here yeah do you know you know probably know who Johnny Hartman is right the jazz singer beautiful baritone voice just designed for singing singing love songs and Johnny Hartman and thank you for being such a great audience and I'll read this poem and then if you like you can go no but every oh you can actually but if you want to say we'd have a little conversation it will a question an answer they don't sign some books and all that anyway the poem is called nightclub you are so beautiful and I am a fool to be in love with you is a theme that keeps coming up in songs and there seems to be no room for variation I have never heard anyone saying I am so beautiful and you are a fool to be in love with me even though this notion has surely crossed the minds of women and men alike you are so beautiful too bad you're a fool is another one you don't hear Oh or you are a fool to consider me beautiful that one you will never hear guaranty for no particular reason this afternoon I am listening to Johnny Hartman whose dark voice can curl around the concepts of love beauty and foolishness like no one else's can it feels like smoke curling up from a cigarette someone left burning on a baby grand piano around three o'clock in the morning smoke that billows up into the bright lights well out there in the darkness some of the beautiful fools have gathered around little tables to listen some with their eyes closed others leaning forward into the music as if it were holding them up or just twirling the loose ice in a glass slipping by degrees into a rhythmic dream yes there is all this foolish beauty born beyond midnight that has no desire to go home especially now when everyone in the room is watching the large man with the tenor sax that hangs from his neck like a golden fish he moves forward to the edge of the stage and hands the instrument down and nods that I should play so I put the mouse mouthpiece to my lips and blow into it with all my living breath we are all so foolish my long bebop solo begins by saying so damn foolish we have become beautiful without even knowing it thank you

Channel: Martha's Vineyard Productions

Views: 1,805

Rating: 4.818182 out of 5

Keywords: the most popular poet in America, q&a, poem, poet, reading, live, audience, billy collins, poetry, poet laureate

Id: bdMyZtiPLeA

Length: 59min 56sec (3596 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 11 2019