by: Billy Collins
was what they called you in high school
if you tripped on a shoelace in the hall
and all your books went flying.
Or if you walked into an open locker door,
you would be known as Einstein,
who imagined riding a streetcar into infinity.
Later, genius became someone
who could take a sliver of chalk and square pi
a hundred places out beyond the decimal point,
or a man painting on his back on a scaffold,
or drawing a waterwheel in a margin,
or spinning out a little night music.
But earlier this week on a wooded path,
I thought the swans afloat on the reservoir
were the true geniuses,
if you tripped on a shoelace in the hall
and all your books went flying.
Or if you walked into an open locker door,
you would be known as Einstein,
who imagined riding a streetcar into infinity.
Later, genius became someone
who could take a sliver of chalk and square pi
a hundred places out beyond the decimal point,
or a man painting on his back on a scaffold,
or drawing a waterwheel in a margin,
or spinning out a little night music.
But earlier this week on a wooded path,
I thought the swans afloat on the reservoir
were the true geniuses,
the ones who had figured out how to fly,
how to be both beautiful and brutal,
and how to mate for life.
Twenty-four geniuses in all,
for I numbered them as Yeats had done,
deployed upon the calm, crystalline surface—
forty-eight if we count their white reflections,
or an even fifty if you want to throw in me
and the dog running up ahead,
who were at least smart enough to be out
that morning—she sniffing the ground,
me with my head up in the bright morning air.
It's a word I don't use very often, because I'm not really sure how to define it or apply it. How do you know people are geniuses? Can they sit down at a piano and play "Rhapsody in Blue" without ever taking a single lesson? Or recite pi to the 100th decimal place, as Collins writes? Compose a sonnet sequence in the space of an hour or so? Sculpt Michelangelo's "David" out of mashed potatoes? Write a novel about Bigfoot that wins the Pulitzer Prize?
I spent a good portion of today in the company of an old friend from grad school--Bonnie Jo Campbell. I appeared on TV with her this morning, and she gave a reading/presentation tonight at the library. At one point, we got stuck in a traffic jam for about a half hour, and so we had a lot of time to visit and catch up on each other's lives.
Bonnie is a writer. She's been nominated for the National Book Award and has won a Pushcart Prize. Her latest book, The Waters, was featured as a "Read with Jenna" selection on The Today Show. Many people would call Bonnie a genius. Except Bonnie.
During her presentation at the library this evening, Bonnie said she doesn't really believe in those kinds of labels--"genius" and "gifted" and "talented." Instead, she believes in hard work and discipline when it comes to writing. For example, The Waters (a brilliant novel) took Bonnie eight-and-a-half years to complete. She kept on referring to the hundreds of drafts of the book she went through. It sounded like a real struggle for her, physically and emotionally.
The next question that you're probably asking is "Why put yourself through that much stress and pain?" I can answer that question for Bonnie, since I've been through sort of the same struggle with my manuscript of Bigfoot poems, which took me over 20 years (from first poem to last) to complete: You do it because you HAVE to. An idea takes hold of you, and nothing short of another ice age can stop you from bringing that idea to fruition.
In between the first word embedded on the first page and the final punctuation mark on the final page, there are all kinds of challenges: self-doubt, bad drafts, revisions of revisions of revisions, deaths, illnesses, marital strife, global pandemics, government insurrections. In very few instances is there a straight line from "once upon a time" to "happily ever after." Writing a book takes a lot of once upon a times.
And a lot of hard work. If you define "genius" or "talent" of "giftedness" by the number of hours/days/weeks/months/years it takes to create or accomplish something, then Bonnie is a genius. So am I. So is every young person graduating from high school and college (that's, at minimum, at least 14 years of continuous labor).
I do believe that a person can have a natural affinity for writing or music or art or sculpting or plumbing or mathematics. That's just the way the human brain works. But that doesn't mean that a person who can string words together more easily than others or sit at a piano and sight-read a concerto is a genius. Nope. My poems always go through multiple drafts. Each blog post I publish goes through at least four or five versions before I release it into the world. One of my lyric essays can take months to complete.
In short, here is the equation Saint Marty is proposing: genius = time + hard work + luck.
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