tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6711372399927809289.post4018266062721257430..comments2021-08-10T07:53:54.681-07:00Comments on It's A Livre Life: Billy Collins RebuttalEllishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01809613889067885185noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6711372399927809289.post-25035283453080858852011-02-05T13:31:27.750-08:002011-02-05T13:31:27.750-08:00From AD:
MARGINALIA IS ALSO A GOOD ONE:
BY BILLY...From AD:<br />MARGINALIA IS ALSO A GOOD ONE:<br /> <br />BY BILLY COLLINS<br /><br /> Sometimes the notes are ferocious,<br />skirmishes against the author<br />raging along the borders of every page<br />in tiny black script.<br />If I could just get my hands on you,<br />Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,<br />they seem to say,<br />I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.<br /><br />Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -<br />"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -<br />that kind of thing.<br />I remember once looking up from my reading,<br />my thumb as a bookmark,<br />trying to imagine what the person must look like<br />why wrote "Don't be a ninny"<br />alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.<br /><br />Students are more modest<br />needing to leave only their splayed footprints<br />along the shore of the page.<br />One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.<br />Another notes the presence of "Irony"<br />fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.<br /><br />Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,<br />Hands cupped around their mouths.<br />"Absolutely," they shout<br />to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.<br />"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"<br />Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points<br />rain down along the sidelines.<br /><br />And if you have managed to graduate from college<br />without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"<br />in a margin, perhaps now<br />is the time to take one step forward.<br /><br />We have all seized the white perimeter as our own<br />and reached for a pen if only to show<br />we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;<br />we pressed a thought into the wayside,<br />planted an impression along the verge.<br /><br />Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria<br />jotted along the borders of the Gospels<br />brief asides about the pains of copying,<br />a bird signing near their window,<br />or the sunlight that illuminated their page-<br />anonymous men catching a ride into the future<br />on a vessel more lasting than themselves.<br /><br />And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,<br />they say, until you have read him<br />enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.<br /><br />Yet the one I think of most often,<br />the one that dangles from me like a locket,<br />was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye<br />I borrowed from the local library<br />one slow, hot summer.<br />I was just beginning high school then,<br />reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,<br />and I cannot tell you<br />how vastly my loneliness was deepened,<br />how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,<br />when I found on one page<br /><br />A few greasy looking smears<br />and next to them, written in soft pencil-<br />by a beautiful girl, I could tell,<br />whom I would never meet-<br />"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."Ellishttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01809613889067885185noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6711372399927809289.post-8478933311234368932011-02-05T12:42:02.558-08:002011-02-05T12:42:02.558-08:00haha "press close barebosomed night!" lo...haha "press close barebosomed night!" love it. I agree about billy collins...i think he is the first poet who got me liking poetry...i had always liked shakespeare and all but it never really hit home as much for me as billy collins did. he was like the gateway drug for me into appreciating all kinds of poetry...now i love poetry...but always my favorite it the plainspken kind that billy collins does consistently the best. <br /><br />i agree with what acton said that sometimes he can be annoyingly mundane...but that's just what he's interested in...like most people. <br /><br />another thing about him is he makes you feel like you are THIS close to writing poetry yourself since his poems are so deceptively simple...<br /><br />keep up the good work it's a livre life!!vichttp://www.drburnshead.tumblr.comnoreply@blogger.com