The Poets are at their Windows

This is my favorite poem from the Billy Collins reading at BYU the other month. His description of the "hard work" of writing is extremely true: if only those cooks and clerks understood how hard staring out windows is! I'm not sure of the stanza spacing of this poem, since as I said, I hear it aloud, and I'm copying the text from Amazon's product description. Oh well. Enjoy it anyway.

Monday

The birds are in their trees,
the toast is in the toaster,
and the poets are at their windows.
They are at their windows
in every section of the tangerine of earth-
the Chinese poets looking up at the moon,
the American poets gazing out
at the pink and blue ribbons of sunrise.
The clerks are at their desks,
the miners are down in their mines,
and the poets are looking out their windows
maybe with a cigarette, a cup of tea,
and maybe a flannel shirt or bathrobe is involved.
The proofreaders are playing the ping-pong
game of proofreading,
glancing back and forth from page to page,
the chefs are dicing celery and potatoes,
and the poets are at their windows
because it is their job for which
they are paid nothing every Friday afternoon.
Which window it hardly seems to matter
though many have a favorite,
for there is always something to see-
a bird grasping a thin branch,
the headlights of a taxi rounding a corner,
those two boys in wool caps angling across the street.
The fishermen bob in their boats,
the linemen climb their round poles,
the barbers wait by their mirrors and chairs,
and the poets continue to stare
at the cracked birdbath or a limb knocked down by the wind.
By now, it should go without saying
that what the oven is to the baker
and the berry-stained blouse to the dry cleaner,
so the window is to the poet.
Just think-
before the invention of the window,
the poets would have had to put on a jacket
and a winter hat to go outside
or remain indoors with only a wall to stare at.
And when I say a wall,
I do not mean a wall with striped wallpaper
and a sketch of a cow in a frame.
I mean a cold wall of fieldstones,
the wall of the medieval sonnet,
the original woman's heart of stone,
the stone caught in the throat of her poet-lover.


-Billy Collins

April is the Cruellest Month

For National Poetry Month, I'm going to share a few of my favorite poems, both by me and by much better poets. I can't promise it'll be every day, but I'm going to try. This will be a bit of a stretch since I'm not a huge reader of poetry, but maybe it'll force me outside my shell and get me to remember the ones that I like. I like the idea of reading poetry, but actually doing it is pretty hard. Very few collections of modern poetry are readable outside of a classroom setting, with someone to guide you through them.

I'm sorry for the cop out of starting with such a famous poem, but I can't help thinking of the irony that April is NaPoMo when I read these words. Also, for a student at BYU with no spring break forthcoming, at least the first part of April is always the cruelest. This is also one of the more lucid passages from "The Wasteland"--besides the chess match, which I also love. I like Eliot's very British reflection on the character of the seasons. It seems that as a suburbanite, I tend to not notice their character as much as I do the inconveniences they cause me. I'd like to be more British in that way--to have a knowledge of the seasons planted in my brain.

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.

-T.S. Eliot, "The Wasteland" (lines 1-11)