So I guess this is the latest installment in the ongoing series of posts that I like to call “Poetry Written by People Better at Poetry than Me”. I recently finished a collection called Questions About Angels by Billy Collins and it was quite good and let me tell you, that man can write a poem about a hangover like nobody else (track down a poem called “Saturday Morning”). But not just that. He is funny and tender and sometimes he tosses off little lines that are startling in how good they are, like in the poem “The Dead” when he just nonchalantly says, “they are looking down through the glass-bottom boats of/heaven”
He is that kind of poet, the aw-schucks did that thing I just wrote break your heart a little? kind of poet. Below are some of my favorite little bits from the collection. I know it is sacrilege to extract them from their home this way, but why don’t you just go read the book yourself if you care so much? Huh?
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The Valley of Forgiveness is lined with condominiums
and chain saws are howling in the Forest of Despair.
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It is a small noun about the size of a mouse,
one that will be seldom used by anyone,
like a synonym for isthmus,
but they are pursuing the creature zealously.
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I am concentration itself: I exist in a universe
where there is nothing but sex, death, and typewriting.
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It is enough to realize that every common object
in this sunny little room will outlive me—
the carpet, radio, bookstand and rocker.
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Ah, but tonight I will drink red wine at dinner.
I will continue to drink red wine after dinner.
Then I will lie down in the dark greens of the lawn
and think of something entirely new.
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The small camel leaves his common place
on the front of the pack of cigarettes
and sways away across the floorboards in search of water.
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I will stare into the cold, unblinking eyes of cows.
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I wonder if I have become smaller or has the bedroom
always been the size of a western state.
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Keeping still
and emitting thin, evenly spaced
waves of irony
may help.
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Below is the complete poem “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 into that book you always carry.
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I’m not going to excerpt from them, because it would ruin their effect, but if you have the chance you should look up his poems “Candle Hat” (about Goya) and “American Sonnett” (about postcards), and “History Teacher” (about a history teacher trying to save his students from the weight of history) and “The Death of Allegory” (about the death of allegory).
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