The Trouble with Poetry: And Other Poems Read online

  Praise for

  The Trouble with Poetry

  “Clever, subtle and engaging … offer[ing] moments of sweetness, truth and easy humor.”

  —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

  “In his latest collection … Collins demonstrates why he is one of our best poets, with his appealing trademark style: a self-deprecating charm, playful wit and unexpected imaginative leaps.… [He] is adept at the perfect, shimmering phrase.… With an easy nonchalance and deceptive simplicity, [he] explores our world.… Sit back and enjoy this ride with Collins at the wheel.”

  —San Antonio Express-News

  “[Collins] moves you to laughter and tears, often during the course of one poem.… His insight into the human condition astonishes.”

  —Pages

  “Billy Collins is the Oprah of poetry.… By careful observation, Collins spins comic gold from the dross of quotidian suburban life.… Chipping away at the surface, he surprises you by scraping to the wood underneath, to some deeper truth.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Collins’s accessible and deeply human poetry would make a poetry lover out of anyone.”

  —Good Housekeeping

  “[This] new collection by Collins … should bolster his standing as America’s most popular poet. All the poems in The Trouble with Poetry are accessible and thoughtful, many are funny, and worth reading aloud.… [His poems contain] a kind of frank optimism or benevolence that is … simply warm and human.”

  —Virginia Quarterly

  “Collins is as close as anyone in contemporary American poetry will likely get to being a household name. Blame his sweet, smart, and wise poems … his colorful personality and ungoverned humor; or his remarkable energy.… This collection is as rich and mischievous as anything he has given us previously. Highly recommended.”

  —Library Journal

  “Disarming … and devastatingly funny … Skeptical of love and scornful of pretension, Collins is breathtaking in his appreciation of the earth’s beauty and the precious daily routines that define life.”

  —Booklist

  “Collins has a firm grasp of his art and craft.… If he gives a reading near you, by all means go. You might just get hooked on poetry.”

  —The Washington Times

  “Charming … With his wit and plainspokenness, Collins is a likeable successor to Robert Frost.”

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “You will find yourself reading the poems out loud, smiling and reading them again, sharing them with a friend. The perfect holiday or houseguest present for the friend who loves poetry—or who has yet to discover its joys and rewards.”

  —Taconic Newspapers

  “[Collins’s] comic gifts … his light touch, his self-deprecating pathos and his unerring sense of his audience … remain evident in this eighth collection.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Stuns with simple language … Collins is by turns insightful, sensitive and, always, witty.”

  —The Advocate

  “The perfect gift for someone who loves poetry or, for that matter, hates it.… Collins’ poems speak a language accessible to all and are filled with wit, wisdom and humor.”

  —Acadiana LifeStyle

  Also by Billy Collins

  Nine Horses

  Sailing Alone Around the Room

  Picnic, Lightning

  The Art of Drowning

  Questions About Angels

  Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry (editor)

  180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day (editor)

  2007 Random House Trade Paperback Edition

  Copyright © 2005 by Billy Collins

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House Trade

  Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are

  trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in hardcover in the United States

  by Random House, an imprint of The Random House

  Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2005.

  Previous publication information about some of the poems

  contained within this work can be found beginning on this page.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-43271-1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Collins, Billy.

  The trouble with poetry: and other poems / Billy Collins.

  p. cm.

  I. Title: Trouble with poetry. II. Title.

  PS3553.O47478T76 2005

  811′.54—dc22 2005046562

  v3.1

  To my students and my teachers

  My idea of paradise is a perfect automobile

  going thirty miles an hour on a smooth road

  to a twelfth-century cathedral.

  —HENRY JAMES

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Note to the Reader

  You, Reader

  ONE

  Monday

  Statues in the Park

  Traveling Alone

  House

  In the Moment

  The Peasants’ Revolt

  Theme

  Eastern Standard Time

  The Long Day

  TWO

  I Ask You

  Breathless

  In the Evening

  Bereft

  Flock

  Boyhood

  Building with Its Face Blown Off

  Special Glasses

  THREE

  The Lanyard

  Boy Shooting at a Statue

  Genius

  The Student

  Reaper

  The Order of the Day

  Constellations

  The Drive

  On Not Finding You at Home

  The Centrifuge

  The Introduction

  FOUR

  The Revenant

  See No Evil

  Freud

  Height

  The Lodger

  Class Picture, 1954

  Care and Feeding

  Carry

  Drawing Class

  The Flying Notebook

  Fool Me Good

  Evening Alone

  The Trouble with Poetry

  Silence

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  A Note to the Reader About this Poetry eBook

  The way a poem looks on the page is a vital aspect of its being. The length of its lines and the poet’s use of stanza breaks give the poem a physical shape, which guides our reading of the poem and distinguishes it from prose.

  With an eBook, this distinct shape may be altered if you choose to take advantage of one of the functions of your eReader by changing the size of the type for greater legibility. Doing this may cause the poem to have line breaks not intended by the poet. To preserve the physical integrity of the poem, we have formatted the eBook so that any words that get bumped down to a new line in the poem will be noticeably indented. This way, you can still appreciate the poem’s original shape regardless of your choice of type size.

  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 ivy 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 happened

  to notice the unlit candles

  and the clock humming 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 wondered if they had become friends

  after all these years

  or if they were still strangers to one another

  like you and I

  who manage 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.

  ONE

  Monday

  The birds are in their trees,

  the toast is in the toaster,

  and the poets are at their windows.

  They are at their windows

  in every section of the tangerine of earth—

  the Chinese poets looking up at the moon,

  the American poets gazing out

  at the pink and blue ribbons of sunrise.

  The clerks are at their desks,

  the miners are down in their mines,

  and the poets are looking out their windows

  maybe with a cigarette, a cup of tea,

  and maybe a flannel shirt or bathrobe is involved.

  The proofreaders are playing the ping-pong

  game of proofreading,

  glancing back and forth from page to page,

  the chefs are dicing celery and potatoes,

  and the poets are at their windows

  because it is their job for which

  they are paid nothing every Friday afternoon.

  Which window it hardly seems to matter

  though many have a favorite,

  for there is always something to see—

  a bird grasping a thin branch,

  the headlights of a taxi rounding a corner,

  those two boys in wool caps angling across the street.

  The fishermen bob in their boats,

  the linemen climb their round poles,

  the barbers wait by their mirrors and chairs,

  and the poets continue to stare

  at the cracked birdbath or a limb knocked down by the wind.

  By now, it should go without saying

  that what the oven is to the baker

  and the berry-stained blouse to the dry cleaner,

  so the window is to the poet.

  Just think—

  before the invention of the window,

  the poets would have had to put on a jacket

  and a winter hat to go outside

  or remain indoors with only a wall to stare at.

  And when I say a wall,

  I do not mean a wall with striped wallpaper

  and a sketch of a cow in a frame.

  I mean a cold wall of fieldstones,

  the wall of the medieval sonnet,

  the original woman’s heart of stone,

  the stone caught in the throat of her poet-lover.

  Statues in the Park

  I thought of you today

  when I stopped before an equestrian statue

  in the middle of a public square,

  you who had once instructed me

  in the code of these noble poses.

  A horse rearing up with two legs raised,

  you told me, meant the rider had died in battle.

  If only one leg was lifted,

  the man had elsewhere succumbed to his wounds;

  and if four legs were touching the ground,

  as they were in this case—

  bronze hooves affixed to a stone base—

  it meant that the man on the horse,

  this one staring intently

  over the closed movie theater across the street,

  had died of a cause other than war.

  In the shadow of the statue,

  I wondered about the others

  who had simply walked through life

  without a horse, a saddle, or a sword—

  pedestrians who could no longer

  place one foot in front of the other.

  I pictured statues of the sickly

  recumbent on their cold stone beds,

  the suicides toeing the marble edge,

  statues of accident victims covering their eyes,

  the murdered covering their wounds,

  the drowned silently treading the air.

  And there was I,

  up on a rosy-gray block of granite

  near a cluster of shade trees in the local park,

  my name and dates pressed into a plaque,

  down on my knees, eyes lifted,

  praying to the passing clouds,

  forever begging for just one more day.

  Traveling Alone

  At the hotel coffee shop that morning,

  the waitress was wearing a pink uniform

  with “Florence” written in script over her heart.

  And the man who checked my bag

  had a nameplate that said “Ben.”

  Behind him was a long row of royal palms.

  On the plane, two women poured drinks

  from a cart they rolled down the narrow aisle—

  “Debbie” and “Lynn” according to their winged tags.

  And such was my company

  as I arced from coast to coast,

  and so I seldom spoke, and then only

  of the coffee, the bag, the tiny bottles of vodka.

  I said little more than “Thank you”

  and “Can you take this from me, please?”

  Yet I began to sense that all of them

  were ready to open up,

  to get to know me better, perhaps begin a friendship.

  Florence looked irritated

  as she shuffled from table to table,

  but was she just hiding her need

  to know about my early years—

  the ball I would toss and catch in my hands,

  the times I hid behind my mother’s dress?

  And was I so wrong in seeing in Ben’s eyes

  a glimmer of interest in my theories

  and habits—my view of the Enlightenment,

  my love of cards, the hours I tended to keep?

  And what about Debbie and Lynn?

  Did they not look eager to ask about my writing process,

  my way of composing in the morning

  by a window, which I would have admitted

  if they had just had the courage to ask.

  And strangely enough—I would have continued

  as they stopped pouring drinks

  and the other passengers turned to listen—

  the only emotion I ever feel, Debbie and Lynn,

  is what the beaver must feel,

  as he bears each stick to his hidden construction,

  which creates the tranquil pond

  and gives the mallards somewhere to paddle,

  the pair of swans a place to conceal their young.

  House

  I lie in a bedroom of a house

  that was built in 1862, we were told—

  the two windows still facing east

  into the bright daily reveille of the sun.

  The early birds are chirping,

  and I think of those who have slept here before,

  the family we bought the house from—

  the five Critchlows—

  and the engineer they told us about

  who lived here alone before them,

>   the one who built onto the back

  of the house a large glassy room with wood beams.

  I have an old photograph of the house

  in black and white, a few small trees,

  and a curved dirt driveway,

  but I do not know who lived here then.

  So I go back to the Civil War

  and to the farmer who built the house

  and the rough stone walls

  that encompass the house and run up into the woods,

  he who mounted his thin wife in this room,

  while the war raged to the south,

  with the strength of a dairyman

  or with the tenderness of a dairyman

  or with both, alternating back and forth

  so as to give his wife much pleasure

  and to call down a son to earth

  to take over the cows and the farm

  when he no longer had the strength

  after all the days and nights of toil and prayer—

  the sun breaking over the same horizon

  into these same windows,