osprey_archer | Billy Collins poetry reading

My life is complete. I’ve been to a Billy Collins poetry reading.

Billy Collins writes wonderful funny poems. I offer, as Exhibit A: New England Haiku.

Whose woods these are I
Think I know. His house is in
The village, though. He

Robert Frost might be rolling in his grave, although I'm inclined to think he'd laugh, too.

Billy Collins read a bunch of haiku, and he also talked about the process of writing a haiku. The general American approach to the form is very loose—“It’s got three lines and a frog, it’s a haiku!”—but it’s worthwhile to try and fit the poem into seventeen syllables, because then you’re having a dialogue with the form. The haiku’s been around for hundreds of years already and it will be here for thousands more and it’s entirely unimpressed by your desperate need for just one more syllable.

So, basically, the poetic form as a creed. You bend yourself to the ideal in order to make your poem better.

At this point I was filled with the desperate desire to write poetry madly, although doing that right after a Billy Collins reading would be an exercise in frustration because I would compare whatever I wrote to the poems he’d read. I did read some poems (written by other people) to my long-suffering roommate later.

And, in the spirit of sharing poetry, here’s the first Billy Collins poem I ever read.

Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep a Gun in the House

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark
that he barks every time they leave the house.
They must switch him on on their way out.

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
I close all the windows in the house
and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast
but I can still hear him muffled under the music,
barking, barking, barking,

and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra,
his head raised confidently as if Beethoven
had included a part for barking dog.

When the record finally ends he is still barking,
sitting there in the oboe section barking,
his eyes fixed on the conductor who is
entreating him with his baton

while the other musicians listen in respectful
silence to the famous barking dog solo,
that endless coda that first established
Beethoven as an innovative genius.