Salon@615-Billy Collins

[Music] [Applause] that's it my people we are gathered here this is great thank you so much for coming tonight and I want to thank Ann Padgett and pronounce this for being my hosts and and the Blair people and ever you know everyone every last one of you I am going to read some poems and if you have some questions we can we can entertain them and I thought I'm gonna read some new poems and some older ones and newer one so it'll be better than worse than better again worse but I'm not gonna tell you which is which so I want to read a poem you know I came across I do enjoy reading in public and I enjoy reading by myself but I I came across this quote from Terry Eagleton is a really interesting critic and writer and he was trying to define writing if you think about it that's hard to do to come up with the definition of this big thing writing but he came up with this which seems pretty good but it made me feel with I question my life in a way he it says writing what is writing writing his language which can function perfectly well in the physical absence of its author and I thought well what am i giving readings for apparently I'm not necessary but so here's a poem about read about the reader so I'm usually trying to summon up the readers presence in a poem I have this one I do it pretty shamelessly it's called you reader I wonder how you'd whoops I wonder how you they start with them put sunglasses on it sighs I mean you're just blurry but that's okay now I see so it's called you reader I wonder how you are going to feel when you find out that I wrote this instead of you that it was I who got up early to sit in the kitchen and mention with a pen the rain-soaked windows the IV wallpaper and the goldfish circling in its bowl go ahead and turn aside bite your lip and tear out the page but listen it was just a matter of time before one of us happen to notice the unlit candles and the clock coming on the wall plus nothing happened that morning a song on the radio a car whistling along the road outside and I was only thinking about the Shakers of salt and pepper that were standing side by side on a place mat I wonder if they had become friends after all these years or if there were still strangers to one another like you and I who managed to be known and unknown to each other at the same time me at this table with a bowl of pears you leaning in a doorway somewhere near some blue hydrangeas reading this and you throw the blue hydrangeas in at the end and now this is something a phenomenon that not many people know about it but I think you most of you people do know about it's the phenomenon of the Tennessee fainting goats right so many of you have heard of this right if not here when where so I heard I heard about this only some months ago and I grabbed a pen immediately and this is called 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 unbecoming a gentleman or is it ketching 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 bar and the fenced-in pastures beyond to see a goat stiffened 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 [Applause] [Music] thank you here's a little poem only just nine lines long about a smaller creature I remember when I first went to Europe Frant wife went to France for the first time when I was pretty young I'd see like that's a French bird like a French cow and they all seemed to be identified with the country they were in and this is just called Irish spider it was well worth traveling this far just to sit in a box of sunlight by a window in a cottage with a cup of steaming tea and to watch an Irish spider waiting at the center of his dewy web pretending to be just any spider at all a spider without a nation but not fooling me for a minute [Music] say a second second wave of laughter there it's a rare thing I was reading I'll just tell you a little bit about the circumstances of some of these poems this one came out of reading I was reading Elizabeth bishops collected poems and on two facing pages she has two poems one of them is called sleeping on the on the ceiling and the other one is called sleeping upside down I think anyway they're both odd ways to sleep and I thought I would make things just a little realistic I wrote a poem called sleeping on my side so now the interesting thing about this poem for me in writing it is that about six lines in I realized or the poem was telling the poet said do you realize I want to be a sonnet and so I said sure okay we can do that and so the I didn't go back and change the beginning so after about six lines the the poem becomes more and more sonnet like and then at the end is really a sonnet ending so it's it's an emerging forum 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 is the east side ignore with its theatres it's 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 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 hoof beats in the ground [Applause] thank you very much and here's a poem oh do you know what a snood is a couple of you guys it's breath it's probably more people know about Tennessee fainting goats than this note as snow it's sort of a pouch right over two women originally were their hair kind of bundled up and I kind of fell down the back a little bit like that well this is kind of caught on with some hipsters in Brooklyn I've been noticed this and these guys have adopted the snood now the thing is I'm pretty sure if they knew it was called a snood they would they would take it off and let their hair do it it wants to do but any time I see one I just wearing a snoot I just under my breath I say nice snood there [Music] [Music] so that's the only troublesome word odd word in the poem and the poem is called safe travels every time Gulliver travels into another chapter of Gulliver's Travels I marvel at 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 is if I were feeding a pigeon in the park like Proust I see only trouble if I leave my 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 where some graduate students with goatees and snooze are translating my poems into Canadian [Applause] so now this is a poem about it's about a question that bubbles up into your head occasionally and I'm I'm quite sure it bubbles into a lot of people's heads if only because there is an actually an Arabic word for this which I'll tell you in a minute but it's it's the question a question comes up in your head and you really kind of just don't want to dwell on it and the question is who goes first a friend of mine a while back said he couldn't we were talking about what kept us up at white at night I've mentioned the Tennessee fainting goats of course and then he said that it was he he kept wondering which Everly brother was going to go first so in an Arabic the word I'll mispronounced the word is yah Bernie's or boo yah Bernie and it means the declaration to someone of the hope that you will die before the other one formal declaration yeah Bernie it literally means you bury me anyway sorry the poem is called me first we often fly in the sky together and we're always okay there's our luggage now waiting for us on the carousel and we drive lots of places in all manner of hectic traffic yet here we are pulling in the driveway again so many opportunities to die together but no meteor has hit our house no tornado has lifted us into its funnel the odds say then that one of us will go before the other like heading off into a heavy snowstorm leaving the other one behind to stand in the kitchen or a lie on the bed under the fan so why not let me the older one go first I don't want to see you everywhere as I wait for the snow to stop before setting out with a Crooked Stick calling your name there's only a one word in here that's just a little uncommon it's mule ich nests which this means stubborn act acting like a meal being stubborn and the poem is called imperial garden it's just a Chinese restaurant picturing an imperial guard and they hear imperial guard I'll use these little air quotes a couple times imperial garden it was at the end of dinner the two of us in a red booth maintaining our silence when I decided to compose a message for the fortune cookie you were about to receive a void mule --is-- nests when choosing a position on the great board board game of life that was my wordy mean-spirited gift to the Treasury of ancient wisdom but while we waited for the cookies the slices of oranges and the inescapable pot of water et I realized I realized that by mule ich nests I meant your refusal to let me have my own way every time I wanted that I watched you looking off to the side your massive dark hair your profile softened by lamplight and then I made up a fortune cookie for myself he who acts like a jerk on the island on an island of his own creation will have only the horizon for a friend I seem to be getting worse at this I thought as the cookies arrived at the table along with the orange slices and a teapot painted with Tigers peering out menacingly from the undergrowth the restaurant was quiet then the way to return to looking out at the street a zipper whimpered in the background and we turned to our cookies crumbling the brittle shells then rolling into little balls the tiny Scrolls of our fortunes before dropping them unread into our cups of tea a little good-luck thing we'd been doing ever since we met this has a happy ending [Music] I bet you some of you have been to San Miguel de on day and in Mexico and so I was there last year and I know this came out of it it's called the Symphony Orchestra of San Miguel de ending 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 breed 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 listen from my canopy bed it sounded more like noise a noisy riot of nonsense until I imagined a gigantic score written centuries ago by the Mozart of nests Mexico the genius who decided that 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 seekers of order I thought as when we examined the lines in our palms or connect the dots of the stars to form a bear in the sky then why not lie here a little longer before rising from our slumber to ponder the greater 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 we're 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 so I'll read a couple of poems of this new book the rain in Portugal I thought it was a actually hilarious title and I made it up you know like all things that kind of wears wears itself out after a while but so this is a poem just called 1960 1960 in the old joke the marriage counselor tells the couple who never talks anymore to go to a jazz club because at a jazz club everyone talks during the bass solo but of course no one starts talking just because of a bass solo or any other solo for that matter the quieter bass solo just reveals the people in the club who have been talking all along the ones you can hear on some well-known recordings Bill Evans for example who is opening a new door into the piano while some guy chats up his date at one of the little tables in the back I have listened to that album so many times I can anticipate the moment of his drunken laugh as if it were a strange note in the tune and so anonymous man you have become part of my listening your romance a romance lost in the past and a reminder somehow that every member of that trio has died since then and maybe so have you and sadly maybe she there's kind of a magnetic north in poetry and it's a points to death basically so almost every poem could have wants to go in that direction not another value just let it go in that direction but sometimes you have to pull it back and I've written a quite a few poems about dogs but we have two cats in the house now a black one and a white one and don't tell me one of them smarter than the other one because they're very sensitive but so you know one of the one of them cut into a poem here the one of them you know we have a strange little relationship she doesn't jump up on my chest when I come home but like dogs do but my mother when I was a real little toddler said to me something I thought was brilliant she said well the reason the dogs and cats don't talk is that they don't have anything to say and but this particular cat looks like she has something to say but she just forgot it and that's that's the only way I can take her expression so this is called lucky cat it's a law as immutable as the ones governing bodies in motion and bodies at rest that a cat picked up will never stay in the place where you choose to set it down I bet you'd be happy on the sofa or this Hasek or this knitted throw pillow are a few examples of bets you are bound to lose the secret of winning I have found is never to bet against the cat but on the cat preferably with another human being who unlike the cat is likely to be carrying money and I cannot think of a better night time to thank our cat for her obedience to that law thus turning me into a consistent winner she's a pure a black one quite impossible to photograph and prone to disappearing into the night or even into the thin shadows of noon such an amorphous blob of blackness is she the only way to tell she is approaching is to notice the two little yellow circles of her eyes then only one circle when she is walking away with her tail raised high [Music] something like the lantern signals of Paul Revere American silversmith galloping Patriot [Applause] now many when we talk about poetry in class and we think we talk about the themes now it says search for the father or the seam of elegiac grief over someone who's died or at joy whatever but when poets are writing the poem they're all of all the poems were about one thing basically and that is how do I get out of here you know how do i how do I find an ending how can I come to an ending and most of these poems are to fit on one page so the ending is coming up soon you know even even when you start it you're wondering about the ending and how do you so the question is how do you find a place how do I find a place where I don't want to say anymore and you don't want to hear anymore so we have this kind of settlement and that kind of a nice settlement so but well Paul Revere I mean I had the last thing on my mind when I started writing about this cat was Paul Revere but it just occurred to me but soon as it occurred to me yes that's the Eureka that's the ending so and there's another poem in here I might read where Ferlinghetti comes to the a of my aid and he he resolves the poem by his near appearance this is a poem called only child or probably some of you out there you don't have to identify yourself but I think there's a signing afterwards so you can come up to the front because you deserve it yes you're special so I've always wanted long to address this subject only child I never wished for a sibling boy or girl center of the universe I had the back of my parent's car all to myself I could look out one window then slide over to the other window without any quibbling over territorial rights and whenever I played a game on the floor of my bedroom it was always my turn gone until my parents entered their 90's that I longed for a sister a nurse I named Mary who worked in a hospital of five minutes away from their house and it would drop everything even a thermometer whenever I called be there in a jiff and on my way we're two of her favorite expressions and now that the parents are dead I wish I could meet Mary for coffee every now and then at that Italian place with the blue awning where we would sit and reminisce even on rainy days I would gaze into her green eyes and see my parents my mother looking out of Mary's right eye and my father staring out of her left which would remind me of what an odd duck I was as a child a little prince in a loner who would break off from his gang of friends on a Saturday and find a hedge to hide behind and I would tell Mary all about that too and never embarrass her by asking about her non-existence and maybe we would have another espresso and a pastry and I would always pay the bill and walk her home [Music] [Applause] it's amazing to cause emotional reactions for people from imaginary characters but but that's what English teachers do all the time Terry the same Terry Eagleton talked about write about he imagined some kind of Bureau some functionary and the great bureaucratic like Department of Education in Washington he's going through a bunch of papers Nate you know pulls out this paper and it it turns out that there are all these people called professors and all they do is go into classrooms to talk about people that don't exist and I like Huckleberry Finn or whatever nd somebody should must be done about this I mean we're paying them to do this just to go back for the cat to the cat for a minute a little poem because they do have another side to them besides being cute that's a little poem called predator it takes only a minute to bury a wren to trowels full of dirt and he's in the cat at the threshold sits longer in doubt deciding whether to stay in or go out and well here's a poem called Greece and it's really it's about monuments falling up it's about ruins Greece the ruins were taking their time falling apart stones that once held up other stones now scattered on top of one another as if many centuries had to pass before they hearkened to the call of tur of gravity the few pillars still upright had nervous looks on their faces teetering there in the famous sunlight which descended on the grass and the disheveled stones and that is precisely how the bathers looked after we had changed at the cliffside hotel and made our way down to the rocky beach pillars of flesh in bathing suits two pillars tossing our colorful ball one pillar lying with his arm around another even a tiny pillar with a pail and shovel all deaf to a voice as old as the surf itself is not poetry a megaphone held up to the whisper whispering lips of death I wrote before capping my pen and charging into the waves with a shout and this is a poem about I'd say about superstition and I'm very superstitious about superstitions but if you don't tell me one because I all adopted so I was in Ireland a while ago and some years ago it's always pointed out it's very young very very unlucky too to accept the salt when someone's passing you the salt if they have to set it down then you pick it up and conversely never pass the salt to anyone always set it down near them and they'll pick it up I don't know why but you can try to catch me at this but you won't others have tried [Music] get it on the table going on so this kind of begins with another another it's kind of superstition ends with a kind of superstition and it's called genuflection the moment I was told about the Irish habit of tipping the cap to the first magpie one encounters in the course of a day and saying to him good morning sir I knew I would be in for the long haul no one should be made to count the number of Magpies I have treated with such deference such magpie protocol the latest being today when I spotted one perched on the railing of a fence along the crooked road from the house this was a bird well out of its usual climate according to the map in my bird book a stray a rebel rebel if you will not flocking with Birds of its feather rather flying to a different drummer who beats his drum with the tiny bones of birds but why wouldn't every bird merit a greeting a nod or at least a blink to clear the eyes a wave to the geese overhead may be an inquiry of a nervous chickadee a salute in the dark to the hoot of an owl and as for the great blue heron as motionless in profile by the shore as a drawing by a Delphic priest will anything serve short of a genuflection as a boy I worked on that move gliding in a black cassock and white surplice inside the border of an altar rail than stopping to descend one knee touching the cool marble floor palms pressed together in prayer right thumb crossed over left and never the other way around [Music] so I'll read some poems from this book here and this here a book another way of saying it it's amazing how you just that word can change your whole take on someone so it's a weird language English you have to the only way to really appreciate is teaching it I think I mean for instance you have to explain to someone who does it was learning English at some point you might explain that to take care of someone means to to nurture nurture them and protect them and help them and it also means to kill them oh I'll take care of a boss don't worry [Music] so hard to explain that to someone so here is a poem about an everyday experience called 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 Cheerios indeed I was a few months older than Cheerios for today the newspaper announced was the 70th birthday of Cheerios or as 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 [Music] so I know you know something about me anyway I am well this poem is about a the situation as an adult speaking to an adolescent or trying to communicate something to an adolescent and it's called - my favorite 17 year old high school girl do you realize that if you had started started building the Parthenon on the day you were born you would be all done and only one more year of course you couldn't have done that alone so never mind you're fine just as you are you are loved 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'll 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 when she was only 15 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 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 up Maria Callas debuted as Tosca 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 [Applause] she didn't talk to me for two years bless her heart she wasn't talking much to me before that so you probably come across poems that are based very explicitly on other poem or in previous poems so much so that the the second poem is a tribute to the first poem and there's a way of going about this that that gives us signal signals what you're actually up to the first thing is you use the same title as the earlier poem and then after that you write you write the expression after and then you name the poet his poem you are doing something - so after Neruda after Coleridge whatever no there's a lovely I'm sorry about the silk off here the lovely poem by the Chinese poet Li Po called drinking alone and I really loved the poem and I thought I'd write something a version of that I thought well you have enough experience drinking alone so that's okay that's part of it but I went through the etiquette wrote after Li Po and then kind of pulled a blank but since that's never stopped me before I forged ahead drinking alone after Li Po this is not after Li Po in the way the state is after me for a neglecting to pay all my taxes nor the way I am after the woman in front of me on the long line at the post office leap oh I am NOT saying after you as I stand holding open one of the heavy glass doors that divide the centuries in a long corridor of glass doors no the only way this is after you is in the way they say it's just one thing after another I like the way I will pet paws to raise a glass of wine to you after I finish writing this poem so let me get back to sitting in the wind alone among the pines with a pencil in my hand after all you had your turn and mine will soon be done then someone else will sit here after me this this poem starts off with an interesting phenomenon it's called the sandhill cranes of Nebraska that's one of their their fly ways maybe some of you have actually seen them but that's the amid the Midwestern Flyway they use the sandhill cranes of Nebraska too bad you weren't here six months ago was the lament I heard on my visit to Nebraska you could have seen the astonishing spectacle of the 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 they happened to be somewhere else but I nodded and put on a look of mild disappointment if only to be part of the commiseration it was the exact same look I remember wearing a few about six months ago in Georgia when I was told that I had just missed this 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 newspaper and a Styrofoam cup of coffee busily missing God no hot God knows why thank you the great poet Howard Nemiroff was also hose poet laureate made up a word for this and stuff it was a dictionary of new words that the writers were asked to come contribute to not not to be funny but to actually try to identify a what a linguist would call a hole in the language where you need a you need a word you know like the word and like you're if you're eating it up Mexican Indian restaurant his is really hot you don't know if it's hot because it's cooked hot or is it the spice is hot so you need a word there if you'd like to make one up go ahead but anyway he made up the verb a verb to is a li 8 and 2 is a li 8 means to commiserate needlessly with some or commiserate with some local with with a visitor about some local phenomenon that they will miss because they're leaving too early or they did miss because they got got here too late or something so that's that's what you're doing when you're doing that you're as a li a ting [Music] well I was saying we can't often avoid the subject of death but other times we just take it head-on so this is called grave what do you think of my new glasses I asked as I stood under a shade tree before the giant grave of my parents and what followed was a long silence that descended on the roads of the Dead another end on the fields and the woods beyond one of the 100 kinds of silence according to the Chinese belief each one distinct from the others and the difference says being so faint only a few special monks were able to tell them all apart they make you look very scholarly I heard my mother say once I lay down on the ground and pressed an ear into the soft grass then I rolled over and pressed my other ear to the ground the ear my father likes to speak into but he would say nothing and I could not find a silence among the 100 Chinese silences would that would fit the one he created even though I was the one who had just made up the business of the 100 Chinese silences the Silence of the night boat and the Silence of the Lotus cousin to the Silence of the temple bell only deeper and softer like petals at its farthest edges see my father was a practical joker he was kidding me all the time so I tried to get I get back at him posthumously buts cell still it counts here are two little tiny poems one kind of goes back to the just looking here goes back to the that the seventeen-year-old girl have to hurt her hurt her age group anyway and the poem is called I'm just fumbling here the poem is called oh my god with with with an explanation point it's a little this it's only this long and the speaker is a very very innocent very naive gullible guy 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 threat of awe even at the pedestrian mall outbursts of praise sprang unbidden from their glossy lips [Applause] [Music] [Applause] and this is a four line poem you know I don't yeah when I get a book of poems a very few people I think read a book of poetry front to back editors reviewers might but I don't know what you do with it but I usually get a book of someone's poems and I just like use it as a flip book you know like that we used to have that like the cowboy l-last suit or something like that but in in this case I'm just looking for a short poem and I just I trust a poet more of he or she can write a short poem and I think it's a it's sort of a point of insertion into the whole book Navy so this is just four lines long and it it it the entire sense of the phone depends on this title and there are poems for which the title is kind of icing on the cake or whatever but some poems make or non sense without the title and the title as divorce divorce once two spoons in bed now tying Forks across a granite table and the knives they have hired a oz a terrible feeling [Music] well we've heard we've heard from a CAD so let's let's hear from a dog this is a this is a little poem in which a dog is the dog is thinking or just thinking to itself thinking about its master not too much else to think about me or dog I guess and sorry and we're eavesdropping on on the dogs thinking he's little his little meditation and it's only 12 lines long and the dog is thinking then we're listening and it's called the 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 on our 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 that is a very sensitive dog right there [Music] so here's another kind of a dog and a poem that's called the revenant it's of just a big word for a ghost especially one that one that wants to come down CEO 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 lift your face I thought of biting off your nose when I watched you toweling 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 you would sit in a chair to eat a napkin on your lap a 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 that you had never touched you 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 is food and fresh water in my metal bowls well you slept I watched you breathe as the moon rose in the sky you took all of my strength not to raise my head and howl now I am free of the collar free of the yellow raincoat monogrammed sweater the absurdity of your lawn and then as all you need to know about this place except what you're already supposed and are glad it did not happen sooner that everyone here can read and write the dogs in poetry the cats and all the others in prose [Applause] [Music] thank you here's just a little no no I won't read that one maybe this is out of season poem this is a good poem to read on August but that's about something kids make a camp in the summertime it's called the lanyard and the first first stands of the poem I always try to get the Ruby I always try to be straightforward in the beginning of the poem and I don't I don't make any demands on you at the beginning I make some demands on you with like Paul Revere things of that nature but well I try to just get you in the poem and so that I devote the first stands of this poem to just explaining how exactly the poem started rolling forward the 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 a French novelist could send one more suddenly into the past a past rice sat at a workbench at a camp by a deep a tear on deck lake learning how to braid thin plastic strips into a lanyard a gift from my mother I had never seen anyone use a lanyard or wear one if that's what you did with them but did 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 in 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 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 as the lanyard I made a cab 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] thank you [Applause] thank you very much it's the various delicate and strange transaction there but at Camp have you ever been to camp you're supposed to bring something back that you made with your own two hands now there was another option was a I think was an option it was like like a little piece of a circular tin very malleable 10 and you know you just this is for the less skilled campers you just take a hammer and bang the bejesus out of it and called it an ashtray [Music] for Dad [Music] and identify I don't I have to identify a flying piece of 10 so I wanted to yeah I wanted to read this poem here it's a poem that I started that took a little pivot as I was writing it I just I wanted to write just like writing about the cat you know never stays in this one place I wanted to write this I think I was watching old movies or something and I wanted to write about the fun flyer sorry phenomenon of men who wore hats in the in the cities and you mean maybe your father where won't were or grandfather or whatever but that that habit kind of that fashion died out around her coat coterminous with the election of John Kennedy because he didn't wear anything on his head who would with that hair he sort of put the hat business out of business you know a woman came up to me after a reading and I had mentioned that same thing and she said do you know what you talked about the Hat of a Kennedy no and she said do you know what what killed what killed the paperweight and I you know audience is that readings not you but often are not too stable I took a step back and she said air conditioning all right so perfectly right in offices and downtown New York maybe before air conditioning you had fans all the windows were wide open and it was all paper no computers so their paper way was that it was an instrument of utility you'd have to have them all around the place but the air conditioning turned them into a curios so there is something if you've learned nothing tonight but that if the subject of paperweights comes up at the dinner table all right here you are prepared so back to hat so this is called the death of the hat once every man wore a hat in the ashen newsreels the avenues of cities are broad river is flowing with hats ballpark swelled with thousands of straw hats brims and bands rose event smoking and cheering and shirtsleeves has for the law they went without saying you noticed a man in a crowd without a hat you bought them from atoms or Dobbs who branded your initials in gold on the inside band trolleys crisscross the city steamship sailed in and out of the harbor men with hats gathered on the docks there was a person to block your hat and a hat check girl to mind it while you had a drink or at a steak with peas and a baked potato in your office stood a hat rack the day war was declared everyone in the street was wearing a hat and they were wearing hats when a ship loaded with men and women sank in the icy sea my father wore went to work every day and returned home carrying the evening paper the winter chill radiating from his overcoat but today we go bare headed into the winter streets stand hatless on frozen platforms today the mail boxes on the roadside and the spruce trees behind the house we're cold white hats of snow my scurry from the stone walls at night in their thin fur hats to eat the bird seed that has spilled and now my father after a life of work whereas a hat of Earth and on top of that a lighter one of cloud and sky a hat of wind so so we have a little more time and I'll read it just a few more pause here's one I think with a helpful title if you know who art blakey is he's a jazz jazz drummer and the Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers and the title is I chop some parsley while listening to Art Blakey's version of three blind mice and I start wondering how they came to be blind if it was congenital they could be brothers and sisters and I think of the poor mother brooding over her sightless young triplets or was it a common accident all three caught in a searing explosion a firework perhaps if not if each came to his or her blindness separately how did they ever manage to find one another would it not be difficult for a blind mouse to locate even one fellow Mouse with vision let alone two other blind ones and how in their tiny darkness could they possibly have run after a farmer's wife or anyone else's wife for that matter not to mention why just so she could cut off their tails with a carving knife is the cynics answer but the thought of them without eyes and now without tails to trail through the moist grass has the cynic who always lounges within me up off his couch and at the window trying to hide the rising softness that he feels by now I am NOT to dicing an onion which might account for the wet stinging in my own eyes though Freddie Hubbard's mournful trumpet on blue moon which happens to be the next cut cannot be said to be making matters any better and that and that is the next cut most of these poems are written in one sitting mainly because I want it I don't know what the end is gonna be and I have to figure it I have to figure it out so you know patriarch write you a sort of Italian 13th century million medieval Italian poet who more or less is credited at least with inventing the sonnet and then it was imported into England later and perfected by she experience but it's still written so this is a poem called sana all we need is 14 lines well 13 now [Music] and after this one just a dozen to launch a little ship on love storm-tossed seas then only ten more left like rows of beans how easily it goes unless you get Elizabethan and insist the iambic bongos must be played and rhymes positioned at the ends of lines one for every station of the cross but hang on here while we make the turn into the final six where all will be resolved or longing and heartache will find an end where Laura will tell Peter Ark to put down his pen take off those crazy medieval tights blow out the lights and come at last to bed [Music] [Applause] [Music] see the this on it was basically panting you know it was there was no sex in this I was all that was driven by courtly love which meant you were the woman was elevated too high to have sex with something something like that that's how I thought they should get together those two those two so here's a poem I wrote some time ago but more and more people seem to like it it's called forgetfulness and Patrick Susskind the guy who wrote perfume wrote an article on called a literary amnesia he talked about forgetting forgetting his book he was it he was in his study with the book line study Florida to ceiling and he realized that he remembered almost nothing of these books he had read at this point in my life I have a like a dementia sort of a imaginary bookshelf it might have like about that long and every time I read a new book he it knocks the other one off and the shelf itself is getting smaller so anyway so forgetfulness the name of the author is the first to go Father followed obediently by the title the plot the heartbreaking conclusion the entire novel which suddenly becomes one you have never read never even heard of it is as if one by one the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain to a little fishing village where there are no phones long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye and you watch the quadratic equation packets bag even now as you memorize the order of the planets something else is slipping away a state flower perhaps the address of an uncle the capital of Paraguay whatever it is you are struggling to remember it is not poised on the tip of your tongue not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen it has floated away down a dark myth mythological river whose name begins with an L as as far as you can recall well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those who have forgotten even how to swim and how to ride a bicycle no wonder you rise in the middle of the night to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war no wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted out of a love poem that you used to know by heart and I think I'll finish with ya I'll finish with this poem it's well you remember the twentieth century right or parts of it Lillith shards of it well recall with me the habit we had of the 20th century of dealing with this amorphous thing called the past remember we used to divide time into little decades like this and talk about the sixties and oh it's like an 80s thing and all that stuff so very glibly and knowledgeably we would can't give these little decades kind of personalities you know and then we'd but we always see it always seems that this always seemed to be a bit of bittersweet in the memory as if we wanted to just stay in the 60s or 70s forever and so of some sort of time loop and we're all I think made to feel nostalgic about the the missing the goddness of these periods so that's why the poem is called nostalgia remember the 1340s we we we were doing a dance called the catapult you always were brown the color craze of the decade and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular the ones with unicorns and pomegranates and needlework everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon and at night we would play a game called find the cow everything was hand lettered back then not like today where is the summer of 1572 gone brocade and Sonic marathons with a rage we used to dress up in the flags of rival baron ease and conquer one another in cold rooms of stone out on the dance floor we're all doing the struggle while your sister practiced the Daphne all alone in her room we borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang these days language seems transparent a badly broken code the 1790s will never come again childhood was big people would take box to the very tops of hills then write down what they saw in their journals without speaking our collars were high our hats were extremely extremely soft we would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs it was a wonderful time to be alive or even dead I am very fun of the period between 1850 and 1821 Europe trembled while we sat still for our portraits and I would love to return to 1901 if only for a moment time enough to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941 or at least let me recapture the serenity of last month when we pick berries and glided through afternoons and a canoe even this morning would be an improvement over the present I was in the garden then surrounded by the hum of bees and the Latin names of flowers watching the early light flash about the slanted windows of the greenhouse and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks as usual I was thinking about the moments of the past letting my memory rush over them like water rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream I was even thinking a little about the future that place where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine a dance whose name we can only guess thank you [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] you're terrific thank you nothing like an audience that jumped for joy yeah I hope you enjoyed that I kind of I try really I'll tell you what I'm trying to do that and now that it's over basically I'm trying to mix comic poems with serious poems and advice if I sense that you're having too good a time I you know I try to get you laughing early but then I I sort of want to modulate that and the and my aim is I hope now you that you're emotionally confused and disoriented so that's the way I like to leave audiences well after that admission maybe you all want to just stand up and go but so are there any questions and I don't think we have microphones or anything but I can repeat the question yeah how have my poems changed over time not as much as you I think considering how long I've been writing you see I didn't get I didn't get I didn't have it a pre I didn't have a persona that is to say a kind of dependable tone speaking voice until I was in my 30s before then I was writing poetry and I was imitating a lot of poets but I was imitating the wrong poets and I was imitating them so devotedly that the result was really more like travesties of their work than intelligent invitations and then when I was in my 30s I started reading people like Philip Larkin and Kenneth Koch and other poets that made me realized that that one could be allow humor into poetry I didn't think that was possible without and it wasn't without being consigned to a little ghetto called light verse and there's nothing wrong with that I love Ogden Nash but didn't want to be a light for his poet so so I discovered this persona and I would say the development has I mean I'm getting worse I'm getting worse is the answer it's kind of just beyond us to go onto the next quest I don't know do you know anyone who is getting better I don't my friends aren't getting better I'll tell you that it's all deterioration but but I did I did I did find this this persona of this kind of speaking voice and he still he still sounds pretty much the same you know he's kind of a better version of me he's an improvement on me but he basically you know he hasn't have a job he doesn't you know there's he doesn't have a past really doesn't there's not much autobiographical information in here I mean I had parents but that's not a big revelation so he and he just you know he falls into these speculations he looks out the window and something Wiggy occurs to him well he's that guy is the same really so it's really it's more than that I'm so attached to this persona that I that I I've been resisting development well that's a good question and a short one - I like that sir and then UNIX yeah well I about how to how to write with with humor well first of all are you are you a funny guy I mean are you just crack your friends up yeah yeah I don't think you can try to be humorous I think you have I think you have to be humorous in your life or have a humorous way of looking at things and then import and then allow that into the poetry I don't think it can come out of the poetry through some decision to be humorous dammit you know but I probably you would learn to do that if you it could be learned through imitation then there's I'd suggest I'd recommend rather an anthology called seriously funny which is a collection of fairly contemporary poems of by poets who are funny but they're funny with serious intent it's not just a laugh riot there's something else going on there no there's something authentic about humor too I think you know because anyone can pretend to be serious right I mean I'm pretending to be serious now actually but you know you just go like this you know and if you've ever been in the classroom or two or been interviewed or had a job you know you know is to be serious committee meeting so everyone's that's good that's an awfully good point Ted and you just want to shoot yourself so you can you can put on seriousness but you can't put on humor you can't pretend to be funny you're either funny or you're not so there's something actually reliable about it even though it's it's supposed to be less than serious that's right Patrick Kavanagh the Irish poet said that that tragedy is just underdeveloped comedy that his feeling his feeling was that that of King Lear were like 15 or 20 acts long eventually it would get funny you know it's on Samuel Beckett way but okay that's yeah oh you had a writing backup yeah very rarely I mean the reason I'm doing in one sitting is that I'm there to find the end I mean I'm with it until we get an ending I really can't stop before the end all right I mean and and the end usually it's not very changed because I find that there's a kind of conceptual run of the poem like it starts with one thing goes through a series of questions or something and then does a little pivot and ends up in some other direct that whole thing is done in one sitting the rhetorical run of the poem now the next day or a couple of days I'll try to make it better but I don't mess with the structure of it that's that's pretty much cooked in the first session what I do do is not so much revision as refinement and I'm trying to make that the poem sound better and move better so I'm paying attention to to to cadence and to music all right so I try to get a good even those I'm not rhyming at the ends of lines I'm sold writing with my ear to some extent you know in that poem of the poem the lanyard I mentioned by a deep I had a Ron Dec Lake that's not a nice sound to it right by a deep a tear on Dec Lake and so you know I went to Grant camp in the Catskills but quite frankly but Catskills is like blah blah you know it's Karla spondee it's just to accent it's those Catskills whereas Adirondack sounds almost Italian either wrong Dex so that kind of thing you know making it making it jump a little better yeah okay well who said that oh you did okay well how about make it a good one one book that is okay well I could say no but the the book a book that really was a big influence on me is a book called the poetics of space and it's by a very Wiggy French critic philosopher or whatever he's dead now Gaston Bachelard and I'd recommend that book to everybody it's about spaces it's about enclosures it's about kids making little forts with sofa cushions about children going under the stairs and hiding in a closet about all these hiding places that children have especially only children and how this is where the imagination of the child is is formed in these he calls them felicitous spaces these happy enclosures and it's like tobo philia the love of places you know and he examines that he examines nests and drawers and cupboards and all sorts of fascinating Gaston Bachelard yeah well thank you wow so that's the educational thing right right thanks a lot [Music] you

Channel: Nashville Public Library

Views: 7,033

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: billy collins, salon@615

Id: Wq9Az9AUNXo

Length: 83min 17sec (4997 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 30 2017