01-30-04

I'm discovering a poet new to me. I've known the name for a while, but never got off my ass to go look. What a cretin.

I think I'm in love with the poems of Billy Collins. I've been reading them out loud to empty rooms. They roll and flow naturally. I just finished one called The Hunt. It's about Noah Webster and his assistants tracking down a new word. A little, useless new word that's about the size of a mouse.

It's a lovely poem that calls to this logophile.

There's another one called Reading Myself to Sleep. The poet captures how it feels to fall asleep with a book in one's hands. He nails it, with no high-falutin' fancy-schmancy talk.

Here's a taste:
Is there are more gentle way to go into the night
than to follow an endless rope of sentences
and then to slip drowsily under the surface of a page [...]

If you're not a poetry reader and have a hankering to try it out -- read Billy Collins.

Until last summer, I didn't enjoy reading poetry. A poetry class forced me to think about what poetry I had read. I'd read more than I realized. Once I started to understand more about how the dang stuff worked the more relevent poetry became to me.

I'd thought that poetry was vague and loopy, but the best poetry isn't. It's like wit; best when it's razor-sharp. Words are so sparse in poetry that each one has to be as perfect as possible.

Well, don'tcha learn sumpin new every day?

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