Once again months have passed since my last blog post. This one is about my love of the poetry of Billy Collins.
The Wall Street Journal has referred to Billy Collins as “America’s favorite poet”. And while if an editor at the WSJ ever lauded my poetry, I might wonder what I was doing wrong, one can’t argue with that assessment of Collins’s popularity. His poems are accessible and he writes for everyone in language that anyone can grasp. There’s no need for an encyclopedia of Greek and Roman mythology to enjoy a Billy Collins poem. And anyone who is not familiar with his poem “The Lanyard” is probably going out of their way to avoid poetry all together.
In his poem “The Trouble With Poetry” Billy writes about walking the halls of his high school with a copy of Ferlinghetti’s “A Coney Island of the Mind” in his pocket. That’s the book that first got me into reading poetry regularly, although I didn’t discover it until I was 20, and didn’t start writing until much later.
Since I am approaching the end of my 72nd trip around the sun, and since I more frequently now enter a room and promptly forget why I went there, the Collins poem below is ringing more true each year.
Enjoy.
Until next time, whenever that will be.
Ed
Forgetfulness -Billy Collins
The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title
the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion
the entire novel, which becomes
one you have never read
never even heard of.
It is as if one by one,
the things you are trying to harbor in your memory
have decided to retire to the southern hemisphere
of the brain, to a little fishing village
where there are no phones.
Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses
goodbye, and you watched the quadratic equation
pack its bags. And even now, as you memorize
the order of the planets, something else is slipping away:
a state flower perhaps, the address of an uncle,
the capital of Paraguay.
Whatever it is you are struggling to remember
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
nor is it lurking in some remote corner
of your spleen. It has floated away
down some dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L
as far as you can recall.
Well on your own way to oblivion
where you will join those who have even
forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.
No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window
seems to have drifted out of a love poem
that you used to know by heart.