Sailing Alone Around the Room : New and Selected Poems

by COLLINS, BILLY

• ISBN13: 9780375503801
• ISBN10: 0375503803
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780307431745
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-09-04
• Publisher: Random House
• More Book Details
• Purchase Benefits

Summary

"High, most encouraging tidings"--that is how Billy Collins, the widely read and widely acclaimed poet, describes the music in his poem about the gospel singing group The Sensational Nightingales. The same phrase applies, just as joyfully, to the arrival ofSailing Alone Around the Room, a landmark collection of new and selected poems by this Guggenheim Fellow, NPR contributor, New York Public Library "Literary Lion," and incomparably popular performer of his own good works. From four earlier collections, which have secured for him a national reputation, Collins offers the lyric equivalent of an album of Greatest Hits. In "Forgetful-ness," memories of the contents of a novel "retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain, to a little fishing village where there are no phones." In "Osso Buco," a poem about gustatory pleasure, the "lion of content-ment" places a warm heavy paw on the poet's chest. In "Marginalia," he catalogs the scrawled comments of books' previous readers: " 'Absolutely,' they shout to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin. 'Yes.' 'Bull's-eye.' 'My man!' " And he also serves us a generous portion of new poems, including "Man Listening to Disc," a jazz trip with headphones, and "The Iron Bridge," a wildly speculative, moving elegy. Whether old or new, these poems will catch their readers by exhilarating surprise. They may begin with irony and end in lyric transcendence. They may open with humor and close with grief. They may, and often do, begin with the everyday and end with infinity. Wise, funny, sad, stealthy, and always perfectly clear, these poems will not be departing for that little fishing village with no phones for a long, long time. Billy Collins, possessed of a unique lyric voice, is one of American poetry's most sensational nightingales.

Author Biography

Billy Collins has published six collections of poetry, including <i>Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning</i>, and <i>Picnic, Lightning</i>. He teaches at Lehman College of the City University of New York and at Sarah Lawrence College and was recently appointed named the U.S. Poet Laureate.

Table of Contents

from The Apple That Astonished Paris (1988)
Another Reason Why I Don't Keep a Gun in the House	3	(1)
Walking Across the Atlantic	4	(1)
Plight of the Troubadour	5	(1)
The Lesson	6	(1)
Winter Syntax	7	(1)
Advice to Writers	8	(1)
The Rival Poet	9	(1)
Insomnia	10	(1)
Earthling	11	(1)
Books	12	(2)
Bar Time	14	(1)
My Number	15	(1)
Introduction to Poetry	16	(1)
The Brooklyn Museum of Art	17	(1)
Schoolsville	18	(5)
from Questions About Angels (1991)
American Sonnet	23	(1)
Questions About Angels	24	(2)
A History of Weather	26	(1)
The Death of Allegory	27	(2)
Forgetfulness	29	(1)
Candle Hat	30	(2)
Student of Clouds	32	(1)
The Dead	33	(1)
The Man in the Moon	34	(1)
The Wires of the Night	35	(1)
Vade Mecum	36	(1)
Not Touching	37	(1)
The History Teacher	38	(1)
First Reader	39	(1)
Purity	40	(2)
Nostalgia	42	(5)
from The Art of Drowning (1995)
Consolation	47	(2)
Osso Buco	49	(2)
Directions	51	(2)
Sunday Morning with the Sensational Nightingales	53	(2)
The Best Cigarette	55	(2)
Days	57	(1)
Tuesday, June 4, 1991	58	(3)
Canada	61	(2)
On Turning Ten	63	(2)
Workshop	65	(3)
My Heart	68	(1)
Budapest	69	(1)
Dancing Toward Bethlehem	70	(1)
Monday Morning	71	(1)
Center	72	(1)
Design	73	(1)
Pinup	74	(2)
Piano Lessons	76	(2)
The Blues	78	(1)
Man in Space	79	(1)
Nightclub	80	(2)
Some Final Words	82	(5)
from Picnic, Lightning (1998)
Fishing on the Susquehanna in July	87	(2)
To a Stranger Born in Some Distant Country Hundreds of Years from Now	89	(1)
I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey's Version of ``Three Blind Mice''	90	(2)
Afternoon with Irish Cows	92	(2)
Marginalia	94	(3)
Some Days	97	(1)
Picnic, Lightning	98	(2)
Morning	100	(1)
Bonsai	101	(2)
Shoveling Snow with Buddha	103	(2)
Snow	105	(2)
Japan	107	(2)
Victoria's Secret	109	(4)
Lines Composed Over Three Thousand Miles from Tintern Abbey	113	(3)
Paradelle for Susan	116	(1)
Lines Lost Among Trees	117	(2)
Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes	119	(2)
The Night House	121	(2)
Splitting Wood	123	(3)
The Death of the Hat	126	(2)
Passengers	128	(2)
Where I Live	130	(2)
Aristotle	132	(5)
New Poems
Dharma	137	(1)
Reading an Anthology of Chinese Poems of he Sung Dynasty, I Pause to Admire the Length and Clarity of Their Titles	138	(2)
Snow Day	140	(2)
Insomnia	142	(2)
Madmen	144	(2)
Sonnet	146	(1)
Idiomatic	147	(1)
The Waitress	148	(3)
The Butterfly Effect	151	(1)
Serenade	152	(2)
The Three Wishes	154	(2)
Pavilion	156	(2)
The Movies	158	(2)
Jealousy	160	(2)
Tomes	162	(2)
Man Listening to Disc	164	(2)
Scotland	166	(2)
November	168	(1)
The Iron Bridge	169	(2)
The Flight of the Reader	171

Excerpts

from

The Apple That Astonished Paris

(1988)

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. Walking Across the Atlantic

I wait for the holiday crowd to clear the beach

before stepping onto the first wave.

Soon I am walking across the Atlantic

thinking about Spain,

checking for whales, waterspouts.

I feel the water holding up my shifting weight.

Tonight I will sleep on its rocking surface.

But for now I try to imagine what

this must look like to the fish below,

the bottoms of my feet appearing, disappearing. Plight of the Troubadour

For a good hour I have been singing lays

in langue d’oc to a woman who knows

only langue d’oïl, an odd Picard dialect

at that.

The European love lyric is flourishing

with every tremor of my voice,

yet a friend has had to tap my shoulder

to tell me she has not caught a word.

My sentiments are tangled like kites

in the branches of her incomprehension,

and soon I will be lost in an anthology

and poets will no longer wear hats like mine.

Provence will be nothing more

than a pink hue on a map or an answer on a test.

And still the woman smiles over at me

feigning this look of sisterly understanding. The Lesson

In the morning when I found History

snoring heavily on the couch,

I took down his overcoat from the rack

and placed its weight over my shoulder blades.

It would protect me on the cold walk

into the village for milk and the paper

and I figured he would not mind,

not after our long conversation the night before.

How unexpected his blustering anger

when I returned covered with icicles,

the way he rummaged through the huge pockets

making sure no major battle or English queen

had fallen out and become lost in the deep snow. Winter Syntax

A sentence starts out like a lone traveler

heading into a blizzard at midnight,

tilting into the wind, one arm shielding his face,

the tails of his thin coat flapping behind him.

There are easier ways of making sense,

the connoisseurship of gesture, for example.

You hold a girl’s face in your hands like a vase.

You lift a gun from the glove compartment

and toss it out the window into the desert heat.

These cool moments are blazing with silence.

The full moon makes sense. When a cloud crosses it

it becomes as eloquent as a bicycle leaning

outside a drugstore or a dog who sleeps all afternoon

in a corner of the couch.

Bare branches in winter are a form of writing.

The unclothed body is autobiography.

Every lake is a vowel, every island a noun.

But the traveler persists in his misery,

struggling all night through the deepening snow,

leaving a faint alphabet of bootprints

on the white hills and the white floors of valleys,

a message for field mice and passing crows.

At dawn he will spot the vine of smoke

rising from your chimney, and when he stands

before you shivering, draped in sparkling frost,

a smile will appear in the beard of icicles,

and the man will express a complete thought. Advice to Writers

Even if it keeps you up all night,

wash down the walls and scrub the floor

of your study before composing a syllable.

Clean the place as if the Pope were on his way.

Spotlessness is the niece of inspiration.

The more you clean, the more brilliant

your writing will be, so do not hesitate to take

to the open fields to scour the undersides

of rocks or swab in the dark forest

upper branches, nests full of eggs.

When you find your way back home

and stow the sponges and brushes under the sink,

you will behold in the light of dawn

the immaculate altar of your desk,

a clean surface in the middle of a clean world.

From a small vase, sparkling blue, lift

a yellow pencil, the sharpest of the bouquet,

and cover pages with tiny sentences

like long rows of devoted ants

that followed you in from the woods. The Rival Poet

The column of your book titles,

always introducing your latest one,

looms over me like Roman architecture.

It is longer than the name

of an Italian countess, longer

than this poem will probably be.

Etched on the head of a pin,

my own production would leave room for

The Lord’s Prayer and many dancing angels.

No matter.

In my revenge daydream I am the one

poised on the marble staircase

high above the crowded ballroom.

A retainer in livery announces me

and the Contessa Maria Teresa Isabella

Veronica Multalire Eleganza de Bella Ferrari.

You are the one below

fidgeting in your rented tux

with some local Cindy hanging all over you. Insomnia

After counting all the sheep in the world

I enumerate the wildebeests, snails,

camels, skylarks, etc.,

then I add up all the zoos and aquariums,

country by country.

By early light I am asleep

in a nightmare about drowning in the Flood,

yelling across the rising water

at preoccupied Noah as his wondrous

ark sails by and begins to grow smaller.

Now a silhouette on the horizon,

the only boat on earth is disappearing.

As I rise and fall on the rocking waves,

I concentrate on the giraffe couple,

their necks craning over the roof,

to keep my life from flashing before me.

After all the animals wink out of sight

I float on my back, eyes closed.

I picture all the fish in creation

leaping a fence in a field of water,

one colorful species after another. Earthling

You have probably come across

those scales in planetariums

that tell you how much you

would weigh on other planets.

You have noticed the fat ones

lingering on the Mars scale

and the emaciated slowing up

the line for Neptune.

As a creature of average weight,

I fail to see the attraction.

Imagine squatting in the wasteland

of Pluto, all five tons of you,

or wandering around Mercury

wondering what to do next with your ounce.

How much better to step onto

the simple bathroom scale,

a happy earthling feeling

the familiar ropes of gravity,

157 pounds standing soaking wet

a respectful distance from the sun. Books

From the heart of this dark, evacuated campus

I can hear the library humming in the night,

a choir of authors murmuring inside their books

along the unlit, alphabetical shelves,

Giovanni Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son,

each one stitched into his own private coat,

together forming a low, gigantic chord of language.

I picture a figure in the act of reading,

shoes on a desk, head tilted into the wind of a book,

a man in two worlds, holding the rope of his tie

as the suicide of lovers saturates a page,

or lighting a cigarette in the middle of a theorem.

He moves from paragraph to paragraph

as if touring a house of endless, paneled rooms.

I hear the voice of my mother reading to me

from a chair facing the bed, books about horses and dogs,

and inside her voice lie other distant sounds,

the horrors of a stable ablaze in the night,

a bark that is moving toward the brink of speech.

I watch myself building bookshelves in college,

walls within walls, as rain soaks New England,

or standing in a bookstore in a trench coat.

I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves,

straining in circles of light to find more light

until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs

that we follow across a page of fresh snow; when evening is shadowing the forest

and small birds flutter down to consume the crumbs,

we have to listen hard to hear the voices

of the boy and his sister receding into the woods. Bar Time

In keeping with universal saloon practice,

the clock here is set fifteen minutes ahead

of all the clocks in the outside world.

This makes us a rather advanced group,

doing our drinking in the unknown future,

immune from the cares of the present,

safely harbored a quarter of an hour

beyond the woes of the contemporary scene.

No wonder such thoughtless pleasure derives

from tending the small fire of a cigarette,

from observing this glass of whiskey and ice,

the cold rust I am sipping,

or from having an eye on the street outside

when Ordinary Time slouches past in a topcoat,

rain running off the brim of his hat,

the late edition like a flag in his pocket. My Number

Is Death miles away from this house,

reaching for a widow in Cincinnati

or breathing down the neck of a lost hiker

in British Columbia?

Is he too busy making arrangements,

tampering with air brakes,

scattering cancer cells like seeds,

loosening the wooden beams of roller coasters

to bother with my hidden cottage

that visitors find so hard to find?

Or is he stepping from a black car

parked at the dark end of the lane,

shaking open the familiar cloak,

its hood raised like the head of a crow,

and removing the scythe from the trunk?

Did you have any trouble with the directions?

I will ask, as I start talking my way out of this. Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem

and hold it up to the light

like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem

and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room

and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to water-ski

across the surface of a poem

waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do

is tie the poem to a chair with rope

and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose

to find out what it really means. The Brooklyn Museum of Art

I will now step over the soft velvet rope

and walk directly into this massive Hudson River

painting and pick my way along the Palisades

with this stick I snapped off a dead tree.

I will skirt the smoky, nestled towns

and seek the path that leads always outward

until I become lost, without a hope

of ever finding the way back to the museum.

I will stand on the bluffs in nineteenth-century clothes,

a dwarf among rock, hills, and flowing water,

and I will fish from the banks in a straw hat

which will feel like a brush stroke on my head.

And I will hide in the green covers of forests

so no appreciator of Frederick Edwin Church,

leaning over the soft velvet rope,

will spot my tiny figure moving in the stillness

and cry out, pointing for the others to see,

and be thought mad and led away to a cell

where there is no vaulting landscape to explore,

none of this birdsong that halts me in my tracks,

and no wide curving of this river that draws

my steps toward the misty vanishing point. Schoolsville

Glancing over my shoulder at the past,

I realize the number of students I have taught

is enough to populate a small town.

I can see it nestled in a paper landscape,

chalk dust flurrying down in winter,

nights dark as a blackboard.

The population ages but never graduates.

On hot afternoons they sweat the final in the park

and when it’s cold they shiver around stoves

reading disorganized essays out loud.

A bell rings on the hour and everybody zigzags

into the streets with their books.

I forgot all their last names first and their

first names last in alphabetical order.

But the boy who always had his hand up

is an alderman and owns the haberdashery.

The girl who signed her papers in lipstick

leans against the drugstore, smoking,

brushing her hair like a machine.

Their grades are sewn into their clothes

like references to Hawthorne.

The A’s stroll along with other A’s.

The D’s honk whenever they pass another D.

All the creative-writing students recline

on the courthouse lawn and play the lute.

Wherever they go, they form a big circle.

Needless to say, I am the mayor.

I live in the white colonial at Maple and Main.

I rarely leave the house. The car deflates

in the driveway. Vines twirl around the porch swing.

Once in a while a student knocks on the door

with a term paper fifteen years late

or a question about Yeats or double-spacing.

And sometimes one will appear in a windowpane

to watch me lecturing the wallpaper,

quizzing the chandelier, reprimanding the air.

---

Excerpted from Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems by Billy Collins
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.