Mind of Winter

Marginalia

by Billy Collins

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive —
“Nonsense.” “Please!” “HA!!” —
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote “Don’t be a ninny”
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls “Metaphor” next to a stanza of Eliot’s.
Another notes the presence of “Irony”
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
“Absolutely,” they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
“Yes.” “Bull’s-eye.” “My man!”
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written “Man vs. Nature”
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria^o
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page—
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake’s furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents’ living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil—
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet—
“Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”

For whatever reason, this reminds me of Hoke.

I can recall only one margin note I ever came across in a library book. It was in a section of Plato’s Republic dealing with what sort of poetry makes noble citizens and such claptrap. One of my predecessors had noted beside one of these proposals “then Homer becomes Herodotus”.

I don’t believe I have ever scribbled in a book I didn’t own. I have managed to mark up a few texts, but almost exclusively with asterisks, brackets, and question marks. I tried underlining with Hegel. It did not go well. I did, however, at least once manage to delve into actual notes. My copy of the Meno has “Knowledge as Easter Egg Hunt” scribbled in the margin.

Happy Easter.

Out of curiosity, what became of the ability to create new categories? It seems to me that Billy Collins could use one.

The Early Bird

by Ted Kooser

Still dark, and raining hard
on a cold May morning

and yet the early bird
is out there chirping,

chirping its sweet-sour
wooden-pulley notes,

pleased, it would seem,
to be given work,

hauling the heavy
bucket of dawn

up from the darkness,
note over note,

and letting us drink.

Metaphors are mortal. Most die silently, decay, and are forgotten. Others become fossils; such are the ones we call dead. We find them sometimes in cookies. Frequently, they attend meetings. The news of their death is reported almost daily in the pages of editorials and opinion magazines. Often, if we have nothing to say, we say them ourselves. Or we tell them to children, especially those in kindergarten, we wish to bore to sleep.

Many a proverb is a locket with a fossil inside. Once there was the image of a reluctant horse, now there stands in its place a reflex of language. Once a careful tailor threaded economy to forethought without seam, but only a nervous tic of the tongue remains of such labor.

A similar fate has befallen the early bird. I imagine that by now he is tired of catching the worm. There have been so many mornings. There have been so many worms. What use being first if there were so many worms? Why not, just once, a cricket? Or that grasshopper there, the one with the fiddle. In DC last summer there was a great feast to be had of cicadas. The birds could sleep to noon if they wanted and venture just a few feet to breakfast in luxury. These were the days of plenty, when none could go hungry, not if they tried. But the early bird could only look on, caged in words and consigned to a diet of worms. Such is the price of becoming a token of diligence, you stop being a bird.

From what I’ve heard, Ted Kooser is an assiduous writer and an early riser who worked on his poems before leaving for the office–an early bird, one might say. (An early bard one might also say, but puns will have to wait, today is metaphor.) He is also, from what I have read, a poet particularly attentive to metaphor. He is not the sort of fellow who let’s dead metaphors wander about in his verses, not without good reason. But a dead metaphor is only a problem if you use it as a metaphor.

A consequence of being a platitude is becoming familiar. There’s a game I’ve been playing since high school that consists of finding proverbs that could be complete sentences if truncated. Some examples: you can lead a horse to water; the road to hell is paved; a penny saved is a penny. These have a comic effect that relies on their being complete thoughts that seem incomplete by force of habit. The habit of words is a tool at our disposal. As surely as your pupils dilate at darkness, if I say “an apple a day”, you’ll think “keeps the doctor away”. You might not mind that “death is the mother of all beauty”, but “all’s well that ends” is discomforting.

When we read the title The Early Bird, we don’t think of a bird so much as we think of the phrase. And along with the phrase comes a sentiment. Allusion is a wonderfully economical device (letting culture do our work for us) that runs the risk of being missed entirely or seeming snobby. However, one can allude to clichés with confidence.

We know from the proverb that the early bird is a worker, a good worker who goes eagerly to his labors. And we know what his labors are. He’s out to catch the worm. It may be dark, it may be raining, it may be cold, but the early bird is out there because, dammit, the early bird catches the worm. Yet at the fourth line the early bird is not a hunter but a singer. Look at the early bird out there chirping away–such diligence.

The poem then pivots around a metaphor: the bird’s chirp is the chirp of a wooden pulley. The early bird is still a worker, but not the sort we would have had him be. The pulley is a device at the well, fresh with rain. The bird is lifting the sun, the bucket of daylight, out of the darkness, out of the rain, out of the cold. His chirps are the signs and the means of his labor.

In the proverb, the bird finds sustenance catching the worm. In the poem, the bird sustains us letting us drink. The early bird is much changed by the end of the poem. No longer looking out for number one, he is instead steadfast in the service of others. But what is it that we drink?

If Jon were here, I would propose a toast: to the dailiness of life.

Pinup

by Billy Collins

The murkiness of the local garage is not so dense
That you cannot make out the calendar of pinup
Drawings on the wall above a bench of tools.
Your ears are ringing with the sound of
The mechanic hammering on your exhaust pipe,
And as you look closer you notice that this month’s
Is not the one pushing the lawn mower, wearing
a straw hat and very short blue shorts,
her shirt tied in a knot just below her breasts.
Nor is it the one in the admiral’s cap, bending
Forward, resting her hands on a wharf piling,
Glancing over the tiny anchors on her shoulders.
No, this is March, the month of great winds,
So appropriately it is the one walking her dog
Along a city sidewalk on a very blustery day.
One hand is busy keeping her hat down on her head
And the other is grasping the little dog’s leash,
So of course there is no hand left to push down
Her dress which is billowing up around her waist
Exposing her long stockinged legs and yes the secret
Apparatus of her garter belt. Needless to say,
In the confusion of wind and excited dog
The leash has wrapped itself around her ankles
Several times giving her a rather bridled
And helpless appearance which is added to
By the impossibly high heels she is teetering on.
You would like to come to her rescue,
Gather up the little dog in your arms,
Untangle the leash, lead her to safety,
And receiver her bottomless gratitude, but
The mechanic is calling you over to look
At something under your car. It seems that he has
Run into a problem and the job is going
To cost more than he had said and take
Much longer than he had thought.
Well, it can’t be helped, you hear yourself say
As you return to your place by the workbench,
Knowing that as soon as the hammering resumes
You will slowly lift the bottom of the calendar
Just enough to reveal a glimpse of what
The future holds in store: ah,
The red polka-dot umbrella of April and her
Upturned palm extended coyly into the rain.

A Life

by Howard Nemerov

Innocence?
In a sense.
In no sense!

Was that it?
Was that it?
Was that it?

That was it.

Monday Morning

by Billy Collins

The complacency of this student, late
for the final, who chews her pen for an hour,
who sits in her sunny chair,
with a container of coffee and an orange,
a cockatoo swinging freely in her green mind
as if on some drug dissolved,
mingling to give her a wholly ancient rush.
She dreams a little and she fears the mark
she might well get–a catastrophe–
as a frown darkens the hauteur of her light brow.
The orange peels and her bright senior ring
make her think of some procession of classmates,
walking across the wide campus, without a sound,
stalled for the passing of her sneakered feet
over the lawn, to silent pals and steins,
dorm of nobody who would bother to pull an A or care.

I have been gone from this page for a long time and it makes me quite sad to look at the lovely things that have been written months ago and gone unanswered, unacknowledged, unheard by me. Can I respond after such a wintry absence? Do comments in cyberspace keep their flavor when thawed?

Mike, your Mnemosyne post was fine and timely. I too have wondered where I misplaced my soul since transitioning to my latest thing. John, lovely poem of graciously managable length. Brian, glad you liked the Ted Kooser book. Your comments on Etude added.

Let me say a word here about Kooser. Heidi and I have been to hear him twice at the Library of Congress and we (more her than me, actually) have avariciously gobbled up all his publicness over the last couple months - radio interviews, tv interviews, web interviews. The story of the man, apparently, is that he is from Nebraska and he is a good poet anyway. This is a drag. But still, having spent so much time in the slab of midwest that so marvelously coughed him up I do have to say that he has very familiar sensibilities. I am reading his Poetry Home Repair Manual now. If you haven’t heard of it, its what the title says it is, published this year. He talks about things not really being better for having been done one way than another. Yet he talks always about revising poems 30, 40, 50, 100 times before they are ready to be called done. Its a confusing Manual, as most are.

There was an interview with him in the NY Times magazine. Reading it, I was certain that the interviewer was kidding, laughing at herself/himself for acting such the snob when it was so ridiculous to do so. Anyway, I got a kick out of it.

Here is a better article about Kooser. Here is the poem inside it which I love:

The Blind Always Come as Such a Surprise

by Ted Kooser

The blind always come as such a surprise,
suddenly filling an elevator
with a great white porcupine of canes,
or coming down upon us in a noisy crowd
like the eye of a hurricane.
The dashboards of cars stopped at crosswalks
and the shoes of commuters on trains
are covered with sentences
struck down in mid-flight by the canes of the blind.
Each of them changes our lives,
tapping across the bright circles of our ambitions
like cracks traversing the favorite china.

When a critic talks about skillful pacing in a poem they are talking about the sentence that spans four lines and begins with “The dashboards.” I’ll leave the commentary at that for now.