Poetry

I used to have a strong dislike for poetry. Really. The only ones I rather enjoyed were Robert Frost's; and that's only because of how famous they were and the fact I had read them before learning about them in school.

Last year, however, I discovered that I could actually learn to love poetry, beginning with having a tolerance for it. For my Young Adult Literature class I'm required to find a poem or an excerpt of a play or some such, and I remembered last year and my newfound tolerance for poetry because of a poet I couldn't remember the name of.

Thus, digging through my journals of the pervious year in the approximate time frame I learned about him in class, I found him! His name is Billy Collins; someday, I'll purchase a book of his poems for myself.

His poems are rather clever and simple and easy to understand as well as amusing. I'd like to think that I can actually identify with them versus so many other poems that I just can't comprehend at first, second or third glance. 

Here are some of his poems that I am particularly partial to:

Introduction To Poetry

I ask them to take a poem

and hold it up to the light 

like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem

and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room

and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski

across the surface of a poem

waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do

is tie the poem to a chair with rope

and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose

to find out what it really means. 

Japan

Today I pass the time reading

a favorite haiku,

saying the few words over and over.

It feels like eating

the same small, perfect grape

again and again.

I walk through the house reciting it

and leave its letters falling

through the air of every room.

I stand by the big silence of the piano and say it.

I say it in front of a painting of the sea.

I tap out its rhythm on an empty shelf.

I listen to myself saying it,

then I say it without listening,

then I hear it without saying it.

And when the dog looks up at me,

I kneel down on the floor

and whisper it into each of his long white ears.

It's the one about the one-ton temple bell

with the moth sleeping on its surface,

and every time I say it, I feel the excruciating

pressure of the moth

on the surface of the iron bell.

When I say it at the window,

the bell is the world

and I am the moth resting there.

When I say it at the mirror,

I am the heavy bell

and the moth is life with its papery wings.

And later, when I say it to you in the dark,

you are the bell,

and I am the tongue of the bell, ringing you,

and the moth has flown

from its line

and moves like a hinge in the air above our bed.

Thesaurus

It could be the name of a prehistoric beast

that roamed the Paleozoic earth, rising up

on its hind legs to show off its large vocabulary,

or some lover in a myth who is metamorphosed into a book.

It means treasury, but it is just a place

where words congregate with their relatives,

a big park where hundreds of family reunions

are always being held,

house, home, abode, dwelling, lodgings, and digs,

all sharing the same picnic basket and thermos;

hairy, hirsute, woolly, furry, fleecy, and shaggy

all running a sack race or throwing horseshoes,

inert, static, motionless, fixed and immobile

standing and kneeling in rows for a group photograph.

Here father is next to sire and brother close

to sibling, separated only by fine shades of meaning.

And every group has its odd cousin, the one

who traveled the farthest to be here:

astereognosis, polydipsia, or some eleven

syllable, unpronounceable substitute for the word tool.

Even their own relatives have to squint at their name tags.

I can see my own copy up on a high shelf.

I rarely open it, because I know there is no

such thing as a synonym and because I get nervous

around people who always assemble with their own kind,

forming clubs and nailing signs to closed front doors

while others huddle alone in the dark streets.

I would rather see words out on their own, away

from their families and the warehouse of Roget,

wandering the world where they sometimes fall

in love with a completely different word.

Surely, you have seen pairs of them standing forever

next to each other on the same line inside a poem,

a small chapel where weddings like these,

between perfect strangers, can take place. 

Reading an Anthology of Chinese Poems of the Sung Dynasty, I Pause To Admire the Length and Clarity of Their Titles

It seems these poets have nothing

up their ample sleeves

they turn over so many cards so early,

telling us before the first line

whether it is wet or dry,

night or day, the season the man is standing in,

even how much he has had to drink.

Maybe it is autumn and he is looking at a sparrow.

Maybe it is snowing on a town with a beautiful name.

"Viewing Peonies at the Temple of Good Fortune

on a Cloudy Afternoon" is one of Sun Tung Po's.

"Dipping Water from the River and Simmering Tea"

is another one, or just

"On a Boat, Awake at Night."

And Lu Yu takes the simple rice cake with

"In a Boat on a Summer Evening

I Heard the Cry of a Waterbird.

It Was Very Sad and Seemed To Be Saying

My Woman Is Cruel—Moved, I Wrote This Poem."

There is no iron turnstile to push against here

as with headings like "Vortex on a String,"

"The Horn of Neurosis," or whatever.

No confusingly inscribed welcome mat to puzzle over.

Instead, "I Walk Out on a Summer Morning

to the Sound of Birds and a Waterfall"

is a beaded curtain brushing over my shoulders.

And "Ten Days of Spring Rain Have Kept Me Indoors"

is a servant who shows me into the room

where a poet with a thin beard

is sitting on a mat with a jug of wine

whispering something about clouds and cold wind,

about sickness and the loss of friends.

How easy he has made it for me to enter here,

to sit down in a corner,

cross my legs like his, and listen.