the deepening ground

Nursing a rough case of writer’s block. Summer has been full (as always), and time to write and reflect upon all that’s happened or sit in the still of a quiet day and just soak in the moment has been rare indeed. My mind has turned towards teaching, selecting new works to share with my students like some detective stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Dorothy Sayers, a little P. G. Wodehouse for humor, and Tolkien’s Leaf By Niggle, which feels like the story of my life. No real time to be creative.

Here, then, is a wonderful reflection on poetry as compared to prose and plays presented by Billy Collins. I love my prose friends and playwrights, but there’s just something wonderful about the poets, the rich economy of words and sharp focus they employ. Collins says it best and invites us to find our own rowboats and a quiet afternoon … The rest is poetry.

Poetry by Billy Collins

Call it a field where the animals
who were forgotten by the Ark
came to graze under the evening clouds.

Or a cistern where the rain that fell
before history trickles over a concrete lip.

However you see it,
this is no place to set up
the three-legged easel of realism

or make a reader climb
over the many fences of a plot.

Let the portly novelist
with his noisy typewriter
describe the city where Francine was born,

how Albert read the paper on the train,
how curtains were blowing in the bedroom.

Let the playwright with her torn cardigan
and a dog curled on the rug
move the characters

from the wings to the stage
to face the many-eyed darkness of the house.

Poetry is no place for that.
We have enough to do
complaining about the price of tobacco,

passing the dripping ladle,
and singing songs to a bird in a cage.

We are busy doing nothing --
and all we need for that is an afternoon,
a rowboat under a blue sky,

and maybe a man fishing from a stone bridge,
or, better still, nobody on that bridge at all.

“Poetry” by Billy Collins from Nine Horses: Poems by Billy Collins, © Random House, 2003: pg. 119-120.