Poems About Poets

Because really, who's more interesting than us? (Just ask us.)

Photo by Laura Chouette on Unsplash

I’m playing with more of Substack’s bells and whistles, so today there’s a tiny recording attached (the thing above the photograph, labeled “Article Voiceover”) where you can hear me reading the two poems in this post … along with a little audio-popcorn as well, but that’s how you know it’s homemade. If you like it, I’ll probably do it some more - I try to make my poems fun to read out loud! Let me know what you think.

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Poets


I like anthologies of poems, big fruit-salads
with blackberries purpling the pear slices, grapes
and orange sections trading opinions
on the nature of sweetness –- so I was nibbling

happily through this one, until I made the mistake
of turning to the section in the back
where, page after page, the poets themselves
were served up, one daunting paragraph for each:

Masters of Arts, Fine and otherwise,
Fellows (good ones if not jolly, one assumes),
beings who Profess, Instruct, Reside
in capital-letter dignity, creatures I could never

imagine for example in my kitchen (or anyone’s)
leaning on the counter, eating fruit-salad 
straight from the dish with a serving spoon because
they happened to be hungry. One poet  

did warm my heart by using his paragraph
to describe his huge black and white cat
following him from kitchen to bedroom;
someone at last, I thought, with credentials

from my part of the world, until I remembered
that I don’t have a cat. No, I decided sadly, 
the lives of poets are nothing like my own,
and honestly, if I had to choose between the lives

in their paragraphs and the life in their poems,
I would leave the poets residing, instructing, 
professing, would forget their paragraphs
(except the man’s with the cat) as fast as I could

and live my life with poems instead. And by luck,
I thought as I flipped backward in the book, it’s poems, 
not poets, who are here with me now in my kitchen, 
leaning on the counter, next to the dish of fruit-salad.

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Reading Billy Collins


You will spend a fair amount of time trailing after him
from room to room as he stares out the windows,
picks up a book and puts it down,
strikes a note or two on the piano,
and lies down on the couch to watch the ceiling.

This is time well spent for both of you.
He needs the quiet, and you need to learn the range
of his quiet voice, its casual hospitality,
its lucid understatement, its undertones
of deadpan mischief and melancholy.

Get comfortable and listen while he tells you what
he has been up to -– walks and drives he has taken,
the scenery, what jazz was on the radio,
which paintings he has been looking at, above all
which books he has been reading. Little by little

he will describe for you the characters who move through
his days:  painters, musicians, writers above all,
students, friends, women (who come in for much
of his alert, bemused attention), not forgetting -– he would not -– 
dogs, cows, a mouse or so, and any number of birds.

He will tell you so much, so intently, about the weather
that it becomes for you, as for him, a personality
central to the plot of each day’s story,
a story shaped, each day, by twin forces
present in his poems as clouds and wind 

are present in the sky -- laughter, and awareness of death:
the way these two outline, in different colors, the suchness
of the world, the way that birds and dogs and people above all
are funny not because they are trivial but because
they are mortal and particular and precious.

Get comfortable and listen.  Be ready to discover
that where the two of you are when he begins to speak
is not where you will be when he stops. Just pause
and look around, see where he has brought you; you will not
be lost, or, if you are, you will be in fine company.

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I do in fact enjoy anthologies of poems, for some of the same reasons I enjoy fruit salad. And I did manage to weird myself out, a decade or more ago, by turning to the back of the anthology I was enjoying at the moment and reading through the list of short bibliographies. If these were the lives that bona fide published poets were leading, then what was I? Not a professor of creative writing or poetics; not a Master of Fine Arts; not even an English major in college, years ago (though if I’d had any sense I would have been). How did I dare to stand at my kitchen counter scarfing fruit salad from the serving dish and calling myself a poet? Only because the first thing I wanted to do with my dismay over those poets’ biographies was to write a poem about it. So I did that, and went back to my day job while the “real” poets got on with theirs — until we met up again in the earlier pages of the book, in their poems that spoke to me in ways their CVs did not.

I don’t remember which anthology I was reading when I wrote “Poets”, but it could easily have been one that Billy Collins compiled while he was U.S. Poet Laureate. Poetry 180 and 180 More were watersheds for me when I discovered them in the 2010s, as was Billy Collins’s own work. (How many times in row can one person read Picnic, Lightning? Don’t ask.) In his determined, cheerful celebration of “accessible” poems that could still be surprising, poems rooted in daily experience and language that somehow embodied magic, he gave me a vocabulary to describe the poems I loved and the poems I’d been trying to write (around the edges of that day job) for years. His own formidable CV, those of the other poets with academic day jobs … none of that mattered any longer. What mattered was the assurance that I was part of a family of poets who understood and practiced their craft in a similar way.

Is there a poet or other writer whose work welcomes and affirms you, makes room for you at the cool kids’ table? Please tell me who that is! And if you like my poems and haven’t sampled Poetry 180, please hotfoot it to a bookstore or library and find a copy. A lot of new friends are waiting to meet you there.