Wednesday's Child
NEWMAN, R. ANDREW
Wednesday's Child Billy Collins is an extraordinary observer of the ordinary. BY R. ANDREW NEWMAN Billy Collins has been called an "accessible" poet. I won't besmirch him or his work with that...
...Microsoft Word is accessible, extra-wide toilet stalls are accessible—not Collins's finely crafted, rich verse...
...He ponders how this will ever end: unless the day finally arrives when we have compared everything in the world to everything else in the world, and there is nothing left to do but quietly close our notebooks and sit with our hands folded on our desks...
...The trouble with poetry is a good trouble to have...
...Incomprehensibility masquerading as depth is poetry's biggest dodge...
...Accessible" seems to imply we can pick up his latest collection and digest it like an inverted-pyramid account of a city council meeting, or the instructions for a new coffeemaker...
...Poetry, writes Collins, encourages the writing of more poetry, more guppies crowding the fish tank, more baby rabbits hopping out of their mothers into the dewy grass...
...Collins is a good enough poet that he doesn't have to make his work big and red...
...With his deft touch, the mystery in the ordinary comes alive...
...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...
...The clerks 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...
...I won't besmirch him or his work with that label...
...He is the poet of a Wednesday afternoon, the poet of the everyday...
...He casts a sensitive—at times ironic, at other times witty—eye upon the everyday moments of life...
...What is The Trouble with Poetry...
...From a window, no matter the window, 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...
...Driving along a country road on a spring morning, I caught the look of a man on the roadside who was carrying an enormous scythe on his shoulder...
...Poetry fills him with joy and sorrow, [b]ut mostly . . . / with the urge to write more poetry, / to sit in the dark and wait for a little flame / to appear at the tip of my pencil...
...The birds are in their trees the toast is in the toaster and the poets are at their windows...
...Walker Percy once said a person can know the meaning of life, but still has to find a way to make it through Wednesday afternoon...
...And when I say a wall, I do not mean a wall with striped wallpaper and a sketch of a cow in a frame...
...He has no need to hide behind a web of cryptic, convoluted verbiage...
...The day has not come...
...Still, they're not impossible, and Collins himself is able to speak to such perennial subjects as death and time without resorting to mere repetition of past masters or trite observations...
...The man with the scythe unnerved him...
...But still, as I flew past him, he turned and met my glance as if I had an appointment in Samarra, not just the usual lunch at the Raccoon Lodge...
...Instead, there's attention to detail, mindfulness...
...In an age that lacks an overarching metaphysical vision, the ancient themes may be particularly difficult...
...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...
...A good example is "Reaper...
...In photography, there's an old adage: if it can't be good, make it big and red...
...There's nothing overly romanticized or drearily politicized...
...His poetry is penetrable, but never simplistic, never easy...
...But Collins, a former Poet Laureate, may be also hinting that something is missing in today's poetry...
...He was not wearing a long black cloak with a hood to conceal his skull — rather a torn white tee-shirt and a pair of loose khaki trousers...
...This causes Collins the poet no undue existential strain...
...Neither a wave nor a thumbs-up would ease the fear...
...nothing of the confessional...
...Monday" encapsulates his creed: R. Andrew Newman writes and teaches in Nebraska...
...At least the photo will stand out...
...And there was nothing to do but keep driving, turn off the radio, and notice how white the houses were, how red the barns, and green the sloping fields...
Vol. 11 • September 2006 • No. 47
