January 27: "Breaking Up," First Kisses to Final Kisses, Dreaming Up

Billy Collins on heartbreak . . . 

Breaking Up

by:  Billy Collins

Like the nomadic dollar

I pass to the cashier

behind the register

you are off to other hands.

We break up with things and people every day of our lives, from the moment we open our eyes in the morning until we close them again at night.  Some breakups are easy:  dropping your son off at school, knowing that he will be climbing back into your car in the afternoon.  Other breakups are more difficult--watching your daughter drive away from your house with all of her belongings packed up in her car, knowing she will never sleep in her childhood bedroom again.  At the end of every book or poem we read, we break up with its characters or subjects.  When you're done reading this blog post, you'll break up with it, as well.

Of course, breaking up with something or someone doesn't mean you erase them from your mind or heart.  No.  Every individual you encounter or movie you watch or taco you eat remains a part of you.  Forever.  I can still taste the pineapple I ate on a coral bay when I was on my honeymoon.  And I can still conjure up the feelings of standing in line to see the first Star Wars movie way back in 1977.  Nothing is ever lost, from first kisses to final kisses.

A few days ago, I submitted a huge grant to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).  It's the third time I've written an NEA grant for the library.  The first time, I requested $20,000 for programming inspired by Joy Harjo's An American Sunrise, and I got it.  The second time, I asked again for $20,000 to fund events focused on Andrew Krivak's The Bear.  I didn't get it.  My latest:  $16,600 for programming based on Roz Chast's graphic memoir Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?

I truly enjoy dreaming up experiences for people, whether it's an encounter with a U. S. Poet Laureate or an essay on the meaning of joy.  I love the ability of art or music or theater or writing to somehow change a person in a meaningful way.  Of course, the nature of any art is temporal.  It lives for a brief time and then evaporates like frost, leaving behind only memory.

This is true of even seemingly permanent works of art--paintings or sculptures or literature.  For instance, I've read The Catcher in the Rye ten or more times in my life, starting when I was ten or 11 years of age, and, with each reading, I experienced different emotions and reactions.  Because I was a different person each time, and Holden Caulfield meant something different to each one of those different persons.

So, loving any kind of art is about forming a relationship with it, and all relationships are temporary.  Eventually, there will be a breaking up/letting go.  Perhaps you will reencounter and reexperience that work or art again, and you will form a new and different relationship with it.  Or that work of art may just remain a lovely memory, like the taste of fresh pineapple on your tongue as you watch the sun set over the Pacific Ocean.

I've had my fair share of breakups.  Said goodbye to people and things I love.  Perhaps that's why I'm a poet.  I'm keenly aware of the passage of time and the need to preserve experiences in a tangible way through word and image.  That's what all art is about:  trying to capture lightning in a bottle.  Or on a canvas.  Or page.  Or with musical notes.  Or in a blog post.

Saint Marty has a piece of pizza to break up with now.

December 13: A Handful, Serial Killer, "Bow Rye"

This is not my son.

My eight-year-old son is a handful.  All the time.  When he got off the school bus this afternoon, he was grim and determined.  He threw his backpack into my car, got in, and said, "I don't even care.  I like being risky."  According to my daughter, he was telling the other kids that he wanted to be a serial killer when he grows up.

Yes, that bothers me.  But, after he got home and calmed down, he was sweet and funny.  When I gave him a piece of pizza, he made the sign of the cross and said grace.
He's a mystery to me.  Both of my kids are.

My son was about two when I wrote this poem . . .

Bow Rye

by:  Martin Achatz

My son leaves off consonants when he speaks, too busy to articulate words the way the offspring of a poet should at the age of two.  My car, a raspberry jam-colored Ford, becomes, on my son's tongue, a dead dar.  The milk he sucks down in his crib is his bowel a meal.  At McDonald's, he eats fry anyoo.  Fries and ice cream.  The motorcycle across the street, a coonshawwa.  When my father cuts the grass, he pushes an own kowler.  If my son wants company, he orders my wife, Mumma she, until she sits beside him on the couch.

Today, after my son takes his afternoon nyeah, my brother, Un Pow, will take him for a bow rye.  As the pontoon slides into the water, my son, swaddled in a sherbet preserver, will point at the dark line of teas along the shore, at the schools of small fees darting through the shallows.  He'll hear the motors of other boats, mistake them for pains in the sky.  And when the wind hits him in the face, the spray of the waves dampens his hair as they cruise into deep water, my son will jump, wave, scream, laugh.  Speechless.  Unable to say what he feels.  Not knowing a word big enough.

Please vote for Saint Marty

Voting for Poet Laureate of the U. P.