October 13: "The Great American Poem," Driving Downpour, Marquette Art Awards

It rained pretty much all day.  A hard, driving downpour.  It was the kind of rain that makes you not want to get out of bed or brush your teeth or do anything productive.  Except maybe read a good book.  Something with a dog or star-crossed lovers.

I did not not do any of that.  (Read that sentence over a few times.  It makes sense.)  I played two church services.  Took my dog for a muddy walk then gave her a bath.  Went grocery shopping.  Attended the 2024 Marquette Art Awards.  Got a little drunk.

If I were a Stephen King character, I'd probably be on about page 50 and a zombie would crash through my living room window to eat my brains about now.  But I'm not a protagonist in a horror novel.  I'm a poet who had really busy Sunday.

Billy Collins isn't a character in a novel or a novelist, either . . . 

The Great American Poem

by: Billy Collins

If this were a novel,

it would begin with a character,
a man alone on a southbound train
or a young girl on a swing by a farmhouse.

And as the pages turned, you would be told
that it was morning or the dead of night,
and I, the narrator, would describe
for you the miscellaneous clouds over the farmhouse

and what the man was wearing on the train
right down to his red tartan scarf,
and the hat he tossed onto the rack above his head,
as well as the cows sliding past his window.

Eventually—one can only read so fast—
you would learn either that the train was bearing
the man back to the place of his birth
or that he was headed into the vast unknown,

and you might just tolerate all of this
as you waited patiently for shots to ring out
in a ravine where the man was hiding
or for a tall, raven-haired woman to appear in a doorway.

But this is a poem, not a novel,
and the only characters here are you and I,
alone in an imaginary room
which will disappear after a few more lines,

leaving us no time to point guns at one another
or toss all our clothes into a roaring fireplace.
I ask you: who needs the man on the train
and who cares what his black valise contains?

We have something better than all this turbulence
lurching toward some ruinous conclusion.
I mean the sound that we will hear
as soon as I stop writing and put down this pen.

I once heard someone compare it
to the sound of crickets in a field of wheat
or, more faintly, just the wind
over that field stirring things that we will never see.

I really enjoy being around creatives.  Dancers.  Educators.  Painters.  Jewelry makers.  Poets.  That's my scene.  As a poet, I can vouch for the fact that artists don't really get acknowledged or celebrated very much.  That's why I love attending the Marquette Art Awards.  It's a time to reward great people and organizations for just being really damn cool.

This year, a poet friend received the award for Writer of the Year.  I couldn't have been more thrilled for her.  Generally, poets don't receive a whole lot of recognition, unless your last name happens to be Collins or Angelou.  The last time the Nobel Prize in Literature was given to a poet was in 2020, when Louise Glück won.  Before that, you'd have to go back to 2011 (Tomas Tranströmer), and then to 1996 (Wislawa Szymborska).  Like I said, poets are the redheaded stepchildren on the literary world.

So this evening's ceremony was a really great ending to the weekend.  Saint Marty got to hang out with some of his best friends, drink, and eat cheese and crackers.  It was like being at a Diddy party without the sex, drugs, rape, or pedophilia.