Monday, February 19, 2018

February 19: Poet of the Week, Billy Collins, "The Trouble with Poetry"

I am choosing a Poet of the Week that I have chosen before.  He is a poet that my father really liked because he was of my father's generation, sort of.  This poet is usually clever and funny and, also, deeply moving.  My father appreciated that, too.

The poet is Billy Collins.

There a kind of snobbery among some poets when it comes to Collins.  They see his work as a little too clever, his poems as little more than set-ups for a punchline.  I think people underestimate Billy Collins.  Perhaps they envy him a little, because he is popular and funny and also profound at times.  

Anyway, my dad liked Billy.  Therefore, I declare the next seven days to be Billy Collins Week.

Saint Marty can see his father smiling.

The Trouble with Poetry

by:  Billy Collins

The trouble with poetry, I realized
as I walked along a beach one night--
cold Florida sand under my bare feet,
a show of stars in the sky--

the trouble with poetry is
that it encourages the writing of more poetry,
more guppies crowding the fish tank,
more baby rabbits
hopping out of their mothers into the dewy grass.

And how will it ever end?
unless the day finally arrives
when we have compared everything in the world
to everything else in the world,

and there is nothing left to do
but quietly close our notebooks
and sit with our hands folded on our desks.

Poetry fills me with joy
and I rise like a feather in the wind.
Poetry fills me with sorrow
and I sink like a chain flung from a bridge.

But mostly poetry fills me
with the urge to write poetry,
to sit in the dark and wait for a little flame
to appear at the tip of my pencil.

And along with that, the longing to steal,
to break into the poems of others
with a flashlight and a ski mask.

And what an unmerry band of thieves we are,
cut-purses, common shoplifters,
I thought to myself
as a cold wave swirled around my feet
and the lighthouse moved its megaphone over the sea,
which is an image I stole directly
from Lawrence Ferlinghetti--
to be perfectly honest for a moment--

the bicycling poet of San Francisco
whose little amusement park of a book
I carried in a side pocket of my uniform
up and down the treacherous halls of high school.


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