walk inside a poem’s room.

I read this poem my first year of college and fell in love. Over the years, I’d forgotten it, though its sentiment always remained important to me and my vision for myself as a teacher.

At a potluck at a professor’s house last week, she gave each of us a copy and asked us to read it in unison. As always, this is a poem that’s best read aloud. Enjoy! lv, molly

Introduction to Poetry

Billy Collins

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.

Image via Unruly Things.

i could make myself invisible by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.

So nervous! Micro-teaching presentation today… I’m using Billy Collins’ “On Turning Ten” and Franz Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis to teach visualization, a reading comprehension strategy. The texts are wildly different, but they have great imagery and concern transformation and change, the greater theme in my made-up unit plan. Here’s the Collins poem. Kafka’s piece is fantastic too, and if you haven’t read the story in its entirety, hop to! lv, molly

P.S. Sorry for the lack of recipes as of late. Because the end of the quarter is coming up, I’ve been swamped and not cooking as much as I’d like to.

On Turning Ten

The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I’m coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light–
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.

You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.

But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.

This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.

Image via here.

forming a low, gigantic chord of language.

As I wrote in a post a few days ago, I’ve revisited Billy Collins’ poetry, & I’ve fallen in love with it all over again. Poetry is almost always best read aloud (I think, anyway), so I recommend that you nerd out for a minute. Close the door, & read this to yourself. There’s something about reading aloud that’s amazingly lovely, like eating with your hands. We should do both of those things more often. xo, m

The Long Room in Trinity College Dublin's library is one of my favorite places in the world. I pictured it when I read this poem.

Books

From the heart of this dark, evacuated campus
I can hear the library humming in the night,
a choir of authors murmuring inside their books
along the unlit, alphabetical shelves,
Giovanni Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son,
each one stitched into his own private coat,
together forming a low, gigantic chord of language.

I picture a figure in the act of reading,
shoes on a desk, head tilted into the wind of a book,
a man in two worlds, holding the rope of his tie
as the suicide of lovers saturates a page,
or lighting a cigarette in the middle of a theorem.
He moves from paragraph to paragraph
as if touring a house of endless, paneled rooms.

I hear the voice of my mother reading to me
from a chair facing the bed, books about horses and dogs,
and inside her voice lie other distant sounds,
the horrors of a stable ablaze in the night,
a bark that is moving toward the brink of speech.

I watch myself building bookshelves in college,
walls within walls, as rain soaks New England,
or standing in a bookstore in a trench coat.

I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves,
straining in circles of light to find more light
until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs
that we follow across a page of fresh snow;
when evening is shadowing the forest
and small birds flutter down to consume the crumbs,
we have to listen hard to hear the voices
of the boy and his sister receding into the woods.

Photo via Trinity College Dublin.

these days language seems transparent.

This afternoon I braved my living room, something that doesn’t sound particularly brave, but then again, you probably haven’t seen my living room as of late. [Unless you have. In which case, you contributed to its demise in some way that stemmed from us having fun: the whiskey bottles, pull out sofa, Amy Sedaris DVDs, a striped pair of socks whose owner has yet to present herself, etc. Speaking of which, which one of my friends is missing socks? And how did you arrive with socks but leave sans socks?]

One of the greatest things about cleaning is what you come across amongst the rubble. I found myself putting away books from the coffee table, returning them to their home in the glass bookcase, and pulling out books I hadn’t looked at in years. Books I’d previously loved but didn’t think were worth re-opening or re-examining.

Like an old friend, Billy Collins’ poetry is a standby for me. I never found it as thrilling or as challenging as some other poets’ work, but I don’t think I’ve ever given his work the credit it deserves either. Because it’s unpretentious and seemingly straightforward, maybe I failed to see the complexity, the subtlety of it; it’s easy to do that, particularly when you’re younger & you think you know better. When I was returning a book to its rightful home, I happened upon a copy of Sailing Alone Around the Room and flipped to this poem. I hope you find this poem as beautiful as I do. I think it’s best read aloud. I read it to myself while wearing men’s jeans and a t-shirt (my cleaning clothes), covered in dust, and it felt strangely perfect. Happy reading. xo, m

Nostalgia

Remember the 1340′s? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.
You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade,
and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular,
the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework.
Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,
and at night we would play a game called “Find the Cow.”
Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today.

Where has the summer of 1572 gone? Brocade and sonnet
marathons were the rage. We used to dress up in the flags
of rival baronies and conquer one another in cold rooms of stone.
Out on the dance floor we were all doing the Struggle
while your sister practiced the Daphne all alone in her room.
We borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang.
These days language seems transparent, a badly broken code.

The 1790′s will never come again. Childhood was big.
People would take walks to the very tops of hills
and write down what they saw in their journals without speaking.
Our collars were high and our hats were extremely soft.
We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs.
It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.

I am very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821.
Europe trembled while we sat still for our portraits.
And I would love to return to 1901 if only for a moment,
time enough to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps,
or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941, or at least let me
recapture the serenity of last month when we picked
berries and glided through afternoons in a canoe.

Even this morning would be an improvement over the present.
I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees
and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light
flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse
and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks.

As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past,
letting my memory rush over them like water
rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream.
I was even thinking a little about the future, that place
where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine,
a dance whose name we can only guess.

Image via here.

billy collins.

Collins was the American Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2003. A few days ago I bought a collection of his poetry on a whim, and I’m in love with it. Here are a few favorites that I think you’ll enjoy too. Recordings of Collins reading his poems are available here. Wishing a happy weekend to all. xo-m

………………….…………

‘The Best Cigarette’

There are many that I miss,
having sent my last one out a car window
sparking along the road one night, years ago.

The heralded one, of course:
after sex, the two glowing tips
now the lights of a single ship;
at the end of a long dinner
with more wine to come
and a smoke ring coasting into the chandelier;
or on a white beach,
holding one with fingers still wet from a swim.

How bittersweet these punctuations
of flame and gesture;
but the best were on those mornings
when I would have a little something going
in the typewriter,
the sun bright in the windows,
maybe some Berlioz on in the background.
I would go into the kitchen for coffee
and on the way back to the page,
curled in its roller,
I would light one up and feel
its dry rush mix with the dark taste of coffee.

Then I would be my own locomotive,
trailing behind me as I returned to work
little puffs of smoke,
indicators of progress,
signs of industry and thought,
the signal that told the nineteenth century
it was moving forward.
That was the best cigarette,
when I would steam into the study
full of vaporous hope
and stand there,
the big headlamp of my face
pointed down at all the words in parallel lines.

…………………………….

‘Vade Mecum’

I want the scissors to be sharp
and the table to be perfectly level
when you cut me out of my life
and paste me in that book you always carry.

…………………………….

‘The Dead’

The dead are always looking down on us, they say,
while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,
they are looking down through the glass bottom boats of heaven
as they row themselves slowly through eternity.

They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,
and when we lie down in a field or on a couch,
drugged perhaps by the hum of a long afternoon,
they think we are looking back at them,

which makes them lift their oars and fall silent
and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes.