About book Sailing Alone Around The Room: New And Selected Poems (2002)
I am a book addict. I own thousands of them. They fill most rooms of my house, many closets, my garage. They are stacked high by my bedside, on the hamper in the upstairs bathroom, in the backseat of my car. I take a book with me most places I go. I buy books all the time but I have gotten a little less self-indulgent in my buying habits; I almost never buy hardback and I never ever buy full-price. Probably the next lesson I should learn in my book buying habits is never buy while partially or fully inebriated. I bought this book after I had three pints of Guinness and an Irish Car Bomb at my office Christmas Party. Basically, I didn’t want to drive home shit-faced so I ambled over from the BJ’s Pizzeria to the mall across the parking lot. They had a fairly big B. Dalton there which happened to be going out of business. I’m going to miss all the mall book stores, they were charmless and empty of any idiosyncrasy in taste or selection but they were bookstores damn it and that beats any teen clothing shop or boutique that will take their places. So, I’m a little buzzed and the books are all forty percent off. Two criteria for book purchasing together at once; I guarantee I’m going to walk out of there with something. I must’ve perused those aisles for forty frigging minutes, I swear to frigging God. It was like the bookstore of the damned. Every section was filled with the most obvious, trite and commercial books you can imagine. I guess my drunken fingers probably picked up a few gems, my addled brain read a few lines worthy of a sparked interest, but I couldn’t come across that one grailic purchase that combined the right price, readability and sexiness of design. Finally, when I was about ready to piss out the last of my Jamison’s and Guinness I stumbled across the most chicken shit little poetry section this side of George W. Bush’s personal library. And I grabbed Billy Collins. And it was not the road less taken. And it was not money well-spent. And, lamentably, it was not returnable. I would’ve been better off going to the food court and downing a chili dog or a basket of fries. Clogging my arteries, torquing my bowels and earning the disapprobation of my vegetarian buddies; I would’ve been better of going to Old Navy and getting a sweater that frays after three washes. As my two year old son, Brendan, has been known to say(and do), Billy Collins is ‘yucky poo poo.’I read poetry for a number of reasons and expect a number of things from it. I read it because I think that repeated exposure to rhythmic and metrical finesse will help me in my own halting attempts to develop some music with my writing. I read it because at its best poetry can reduce a particular event, thought or sentiment to the bones, to the bare mineral soil, to the most basic irreducible element of a thing and thusly reflect that thing back to you in a wholly new light, empty of previous associations and mental baggage. Sometimes poetry can be visionary, suffusing the everyday with a sense of the sacred and ineffable through metrical beauty, dream-like imagery and an attempt to wrestle that ultimate Will-O-Wisp, God, onto the stage and into the conversation. Rumi does this and Blake, Yeats at his best and Ginsberg when he wasn’t being phallocentric. There are other great poets, Mary Oliver, Heaney and Ted Hughes whose understanding, embrace and keen observation of the natural world brings another kind of sacred to the forefront. The beauty, strangeness, repellent aliveness and tutelary function of our animal brothers and sisters and the sublime terror of the belching, barking flame-cored earth itself. Collins succeeds on none of these levels. His poetry does possess a certain craft, the art of a man who has obviously honed his style over the years. But the style is boring, empty of technical innovation. His subject matters are worse, he uses events of the daily, mundane and suburban nature and then fails repeatedly, sometimes even in a single poem, to say anything interesting, to say it in an interesting manner or to offer anything resembling a coherent and unique world view. It’s like reading USA Today in stanza form. Page, after tortuous page, it continues. I tried like hell to find some poem I loved here, some sort of glimmer of a deeper world or verbal pyrotechnics that offered some vestige of joy, but nothing. He is the former Poet Laureate of the United States. During the Bush Administration. Perfectly fitting in its way, a poet of a time of the devalued tongue and the age of advertising and double speak. Unmitigated crap. Joyless and empty of anything other than the immediate moment, firmly ensconced in the values, insights and aesthetics of its day.
---The History Teacher---Trying to protect his students’ innocencehe told them the Ice Age was really justthe Chilly Age, a period of a million yearswhen everyone had to wear sweaters.And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age,named after the long driveways of the time.The Spanish Inquisition was nothing morethan an outbreak of questions such as“How far is it from here to Madrid?”“What do you call the matador’s hat?”The War of the Roses took place in a garden,and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atomon Japan.The children would leave his classroomfor the playground to torment the weakand the smart,mussing up their hair and breaking their glasses,while he gathered up his notes and walked homepast flower beds and white picket fences,wondering if they would believe that soldiersin the Boer War told long, rambling storiesdesigned to make the enemy nod off.(Membaca puisi Billy Collins di atas jadi teringat dengan guru sejarah yang kalau mengajar benar-benar menyenangkan. Kalu puisi di atas diterapkan di Indonesia mungkin akan seperti ini-Perang Kemerdekaan itu sebenarnya sebuah acara perpisahan besar untuk melepas orang-orang londo ke negara asalnya dan tentu saja sedikit kemeriahan ribut-ribut suara tembakan, kebanyakankan tentara.-Peristiwa tahun 66 hanyalah sebuah permainan besar petak umpet, sebagian orang menghilang untuk bersembunyi dan sebagian lainnya mencari dan permainan itu masih berlangsung hingga sekarang, buktinya masih banyak yang belum ditemukan.-Kejadian tahun 98 cuma orang-orang yang ramai berkumpul di dekat gedung MPR untuk menunggu pidato sang presiden yang akan mengundurkan diri karena sudah bosan terlalu lama jadi presiden. Yah... beberapa orang terlalu berlebihan dengan sedikit bakar-bakar.)---Purity---My favorite time to write is in the late afternoon,weekdays, particularly Wednesdays.This is how I go about it:I take a fresh pot of tea into my study and close the door.Then I remove my clothes and leave them in a pileas if I had melted to death and my legacy consisted of onlya white shirt, a pair of pants, and a pot of cold tea.Then I remove my flesh and hang it over a chair.I slide it off my bones like a silken garment.I do this so that what I write will be pure,completely rinsed of the carnal,uncontaminated by the preoccupations of the body.Finally I remove each of my organs and arrange themon a small table near the window.I do not want to hear their ancient rhythmswhen I am trying to tap out my own drumbeat.Now I sit down at the desk, ready to begin.I am entirely pure: nothing but a skeleton at a typewriter.I should mention that sometimes I leave my penis on.I find it difficult to ignore the temptation.Then I am a skeleton with a penis at a typewriter.In this condition I write extraordinary love poems,most of them exploiting the connection between sex and death.I am concentration itself: I exist in a universewhere there is nothing but sex, death, and typewriting.After a spell of this I remove my penis too.Then I am all skull and bones typing into the afternoon.Just the absolute essentials, no flounces.Now I write only about death, most classical of themesin language light as the air between my ribs.Afterward, I reward myself by going for a drive at sunset.I replace my organs and slip back into my fleshand clothes. Then I back the car out of the garageand speed through woods on winding country roads,passing stone walls, farmhouses, and frozen ponds,all perfectly arranged like words in a famous sonnet.(Entah kenapa habis baca puisi ini jadi terbayang sosok tengkorak yang sedang mengetik sambil mnghisap rokok dengan wajahnya yang tersenyum :), seperti sampul sebuah buku filssafat, tapi entah yang mana)
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I love Billy Collins' poems. I know he is lauded as being accessible. He is. Mostly though he is clever and downright hilarious at times. As all good poets he twists words and ideas just enough to make you see the world differently. His writing is warm and his subjects are often everyday thoughts and ideas--nothing esoteric here. Collins'poetry makes me want to read more poetry . . . and not just his.Highlights are numerous in this collection, but include:Plight of the TroubadourWinter SyntaxIntroduction to PoetryForgetfulnessWorkshopAnd many more. Act now and receive a bonus album of Chris Christopherson singing Collins' entire repertoire.
—Les
I just really enjoy Billy Collins'dry wit and way with words. But here is my favorite Billy Collins poem (not, alas, included in this book, but it will give you a nice taste of his work).the lanyardThe other day as I was ricocheting slowlyoff the blue walls of this room bouncing from typewriter to piano from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor, I found myself in the "L" section of the dictionary where my eyes fell upon the word, Lanyard. No cookie nibbled by a French novelist could send one more suddenly into the past. A past where I sat at a workbench at a camp by a deep Adirondack lake learning how to braid thin plastic strips into a lanyard. A gift for my mother.I had never seen anyone use a lanyard. Or wear one, if that’s what you did with them. But that did not keep me from crossing strand over strand again and again until I had made a boxy, red and white lanyard for my mother. She gave me life and milk from her breasts, and I gave her a lanyard. She nursed me in many a sick room, lifted teaspoons of medicine to my lips, set cold facecloths on my forehead then led me out into the airy light and taught me to walk and swim and I in turn presented her with a lanyard. "Here are thousands of meals" she said, "and here is clothing and a good education." "And here is your lanyard," I replied, "which I made with a little help from a counselor." "Here is a breathing body and a beating heart, strong legs, bones and teeth and two clear eyes to read the world." she whispered. "And here," I said, "is the lanyard I made at camp." "And here," I wish to say to her now, "is a smaller gift. Not the archaic truth, that you can never repay your mother, but the rueful admission that when she took the two-toned lanyard from my hands, I was as sure as a boy could be that this useless worthless thing I wove out of boredom would be enough to make us even."(billy collins)
—Anne
When dinner guests are in the right frame of mind, I read a Billy Collins poem for our enjoyment. When writers are struggling in a workshop, I read "The First Reader" and invite them to write about what they remember of first learning to read. Inevitably, they write well and from the heart. And often cry, but in a good way. For my birthday this year, Tony and I went to hear Billy Collins read, at the University of Calgary. The man, the reader and the poet are seamless, The light humour, the simple language, the thoughtful approach to detail that I love in his poetry were there in his reading and his connection with the audience. He is not one of those poets (and there are quite a few) who like themselves better than they like anyone else. He is open and generous with people. He admires audiences as much as they admire him. I think goodreads needs to add a button under "I own a copy of this book" for "I have a copy signed by the author." I will hear his voice more clearly now when I read his poetry.
—Virginia
