Poetry Dork

Last night I was lying in bed listening to Selected Shorts. I listen to a lot of NPR while lying in bed – oddly, I find it soothing. Billy Collins, the former poet laureate, was reading a a piece he’d written about writing. I’ve been reading a long profile about another poet, John Ashbery, in The New Yorker. Poet laureate or no, I’d never heard of Billy Collins before and I’ve no idea, still, who John Ashbery is, though in credit to the writer, this is a very interesting read. I’m a total philistine when it comes to poetry.

Listening to Billy Collins read last night, I snapped in to focus in a way I don’t usually do when I’m drifting off to whatever nighttime programming I’m tuned in to. I don’t know if it’s the plain language or the fact that the poem, Purity, was about writing, or what. I do know that from the first line, “My favorite time to write is in late afternoon, weekdays, particularly Wednesdays,” I was all there.

The Collins poem and the Ashbery profile are both so much about the process of writing – I think that’s what I’m enjoying about them. They tickle my vanity as a writer, but they don’t over romanticize it. Folks are always romanticizing the creative, a stance I find irritating, condescending, and just plain wrong. Making art – words or pictures – is messy, solitary, sometimes boring work. It’s hard and there’s almost no reward. Hell, if you’re motivated by the idea that you’ll achieve a reward, you might as well not even start.

A friend came by for lunch last week and she asked me about making art. She wanted to know if I considered it a hobby. I can’t call it that. Hobby implies that it’s some kind of distraction from your day to day stuff, whereas I throw up all these obstacles in my own exisitence to prevent me from doing my creative work. And writing for me is more of a compulsion, a habit, like making coffee first thing in the morning or maybe like smoking is for nicotine addicts. I write because I can’t shut up, not because I feel I have a message or because it gets me away from myself. Hell, when you focus on your creative work, nothing screams louder than, well, you.

Before I went to bed last night, I was watching Gilmore Girls. (What? I’m only human. Give me a break.) It’s the return of bad boy Kerouac – I mean Jess – and he’s written a book. Hey, I wrote a book! I didn’t even set out to write a book at all. I just sort of wrote and then, oh, hey, look! Who knew? It’s not much of a book, it needs work, it’s skinny and vain and silly, like Paris Hilton. (I’m not fishing for compliments, FYI, that’s how I see it.) Bad boy Jess just wanted to give a copy of his book to Rory – though we all know he was there to expose Logan as the spoiled frat boy he is. He wasn’t flag waving his accomplishment around. Okay, I’m probably projecting the accidental nature of my own project on to Gilmore Girls. You anchor where you can and I’m way closer to a Gilmore Girls character than I am to Billy Collins.

I guess poetry is like any kind of writing. It’s been draped in mystery, like painting, but I should know better than to be suckered in to that. Writers are good or bad, clear or obscure, they speak to you or they don’t, just like any kind of art. It’s appealling or it’s not and high-falutin’ analysis won’t change the way you feel about a piece – or it shouldn’t, that’s for sure. The writer who’s written about John Ashbery – Larrissa MacFarquar – speaks to me in a way that Ashbery himself doesn’t. And Billy Collins speaks to me loud and clear. I’m still a poetry dork, but I’m good with that.

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I’m off to the library today to pick up some Billy Collins. If you want to read the poem that so affected me, it’s posted here – scroll down to April 12, Purity. I love this.

Billy Collins has a web site, naturally, it’s here and if you go here you’ll find links to downloads and text versions of his poetry.

FYI, my favorite time to write is early in the morning while the city is still waking up. And I have, from time to time tried to write poetry. Here’s a piece I wrote a few years back that I still like.

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Vermeer’s Day Job

He sent his daughter off to the market to buy a tiny brick of ochre
While Catherine, downstairs, pregnant again
Tried to keep all the chilldren quiet so he could work
Silently she hoped that this work would sell for enough to pay the bread bill
And maybe
There would be some leftover for the butcher.

When we think about artists
We never think of them
Turning off the alarm and stumbling out of bed bleary eyed,
Rushing to meet the bus.

We never think of them
Sitting all day at a computer pushing bits around and
Sending email to someone across the hall.

We never think of them
In the supermarket line asking us – Paper or plastic, ma’am?

We never think of them
Getting in their pickup trucks and driving to construction sites across town.

Vermeer went to his mother and law and asked her for a loan
Against the sale of his next painting,
So confident was he in its value.

I took a shower and got dressed.
I walked in the rain to the coffee shop to meet the carpool.
It took us half an hour to get to the office.

Meanwhile, Vermeer studied the place where the light hit the edge of the glass of milk
That he had placed just so in the window.