Poetry Friday -- Hippos

Hippos on Holiday

by Billy Collins

is not really the title of a movie
but if it were I would be sure to see it.
I love their short legs and big heads,
the whole hippo look.
Hundreds of them would frolic
in the mud of a wide, slow-moving river,
and I would eat my popcorn
in the dark of a neighborhood theatre.
When they opened their enormous mouths
lined with big stubby teeth
I would drink my enormous Coke.

I would be both in my seat
and in the water playing with the hippos,
which is the way it is
with a truly great movie.
Only a mean-spirited reviewer
would ask on holiday from what?

Surely you've seen videos of the premature baby hippo at the Cincinnati Zoo, Fiona? No? Well, let's take care of that with my favorite one where she learns to use the ramp into her pool.

I'm sorry I didn't get around to all the the end of Poetry Month posts last week. This weekend feels like there's more elbow room than I've had in months. To that I say, "WHEW!"

Jama has the Cinco de Mayo Poetry Friday Roundup at Jama's Alphabet Soup. Olé!

Poetry Friday -- In Which Billy Collins Helps Me Write a Poem

Life comes at you fast, doesn't it?

Last Friday morning, I posted a Billy Collins poem that was snort-worthy. I loved following the comments and seeing the plan for this week's Billy-palooza develop, but I was not able to make my usual rounds and comment on others' blogs, because...

...last Friday evening, life (and the floor) came at my mom fast -- she fell, breaking her hip, arm and wrist, earning her a helicopter ride to Denver. She had a partial hip replacement on Saturday, and she's scheduled to have surgery on her arm and wrist today.

For today's poem, I borrowed lines from Billy's poems.

THOUGHTS FROM BESIDE MY MOTHER’S HOSPITAL BED

This is the middle.
Things have had time to get complicated,
messy, really. Nothing is simple anymore.¹

I surmised as a bar of sunlight illuminated my orange juice,²
this is the cycle of life.

I say to no one,
this is the wheel of fortune³

and

the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.⁴

Hours, days, and months are but the rags of time,⁵

so

why do we bother with the rest of the day,
the swale of the afternoon,
the sudden dip into evening,

then night with his notorious perfumes,
his many-pointed stars?⁶

Why, indeed.

But,

I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees
and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light
flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse
and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks.

As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past,
letting my memory rush over them like water
rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream.
I was even thinking a little about the future, that place
where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine,
a dance whose name we can only guess.⁷



Much gratitude to Billy Collins for providing me with the words for this poem:

¹Aristotle

²Cheerios

³Design

⁴Forgetfulness

⁵Memorizing “The Sun Rising” by John Donne

⁶Morning

⁷Nostalgia


Heidi has the All-Billy Birthday Extravaganza (plus other assorted poetry posts, including the Poetry Sisters' Ekphrastic Poetry Challenge) at My Juicy Little Universe.

Poetry Friday: Despair...and Humor

photo via unsplash

Despair
by Billy Collins

So much gloom and doubt in our poetry—
flowers wilting on the table,
the self regarding itself in a watery mirror.

Dead leaves cover the ground,
the wind moans in the chimney,
and the tendrils of the yew tree inch toward the coffin.

I wonder what the ancient Chinese poets
would make of all this,
these shadows and empty cupboards?

Today, with the sun blazing in the trees,
my thoughts turn to the great
tenth-century celebrator of experience,

Wa-Hoo, whose delight in the smallest things
could hardly be restrained,
and to his joyous counterpart in the western provinces,
Ye-Hah.

Sorry. I should probably have given you a *snort alert.* Thank you, Billy Collins for a good dose of humor along with our gloom and despair.

Karen at Karen Edmisten (The Blog with the Shockingly Clever Title) has the roundup this week. Grab a cup of coffee and head on over!

Poetry Friday -- Silence

Silence
by Billy Collins

There is the sudden silence of the crowd
above a player not moving on the field,
and the silence of the orchid.

The silence of the falling vase
before it strikes the floor,
the silence of the belt when it is not striking the child.

The stillness of the cup and the water in it,
the silence of the moon
and the quiet of the day far from the roar of the sun.

(you can read the rest of the poem here)

I'd like to add a stanza to this poem about the silence after the busloads of cheering children round the corner and disappear from sight, the sudden unnatural silence of the school building and our empty classrooms.

And I'd add another stanza about the silence of the house the next morning as we get reacquainted with each other over a cup of tea and to-do lists.

I would finish with a stanza on my knees in the garden, weeding the beets and zinnias, the silence broken only by the buzz of a hummingbird  in the coral bells.

Buffy has the Poetry Friday roundup today at Buffy's Blog, and the July-December call for roundup hosts is here.

Poetry Friday -- Today by Billy Collins

Peony and Ant by Mary Lee Hahn

Today

by Billy Collins

If ever there were a spring day so perfect,
so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze

that it made you want to throw
open all the windows in the house

and unlatch the door to the canary's cage,
indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,

a day when the cool brick paths
and the garden bursting with peonies

seemed so etched in sunlight
that you felt like...

(read the rest of the poem here)

Ahh...five more days of school...need I say more?

Violet has today's Poetry Friday roundup at Violet Nesdoly / Poems. 

Please note that Jone and Buffy have traded weeks at the end of next month. Jone will be hosting on June 20 and Buffy will have June 27.

Poetry Friday -- Billy Collins' New Book

Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems

by Billy Collins

Random House, October 22, 2013

review copy is mine


Villanelle

The first line will not go away
though the middle ones will disappear,
and the third, like the first, is bound to get more play.

Examples of this type are written every day,
and whether uplifting or drear,
that first line will just not go away.

It seems some lines have the right of way.
It's their job to reappear,
for example, the third, designed to get more play.

Whether you squawk like an African Grey
or sing sweetly to the inner ear,
the line you wrote first will just not go away.

You may compose all night and day
under a bare lightbulb or a crystal chandelier,
but line number three must get more play.

How can a poet hope to go wildly astray
or sing out like a romantic gondolier
when the first line will not go away
and the third always has the final say?

©Billy Collins, 2013


What fun to have a new collection of poems from four earlier volumes that includes a nice serving of new poems, too! Here are some highlights of the new poems:

Besides this villanelle, there is a surprising sonnet and an Ode to a Desk Lamp.

Collins talks (sometimes back) to Li Po, Antonín Dvořák, people (and ducks) who suggest poem topics, Keats and Mother Nature.

The poems will take you to Nebraska, Central Park, Flying Point Beach, France, Rome, Florida and West Texas, among other destinations.

I think this book will be my birthday present to me, and on my birthday weekend, I plan to stay curled up under the covers for hours and hours, revisiting old favorites and savoring all of the new poems.

Jama has the Poetry Friday roundup this week at Jama's Alphabet Soup.

Poem #22 and Poetry Friday -- Controversy

Flickr Creative Commons Photo by Stephen Downes

Poetry is an interruption of silence.

Prose is the continuation of noise.

Poetry is a bird.

Prose is a potato.

Flickr Creative Commons Photo by PaKKiTo 

No copyright again today. We'll call this a "found poem." These are Billy Collins' words, spoken at the poetry reading I went to on Wednesday. Since his words/my found poem yesterday sparked some lively discussion, I thought I'd go ahead with another "found poem" that seems to have controversy (pun intended) at its heart.

What pair of metaphors would you propose for poetry and prose? (Obviously, Billy Collins is a leeetle biased towards poetry!!)

The roundup today is at Book Aunt. Happy Friday! Happy Poetry Month! Happy Spring! Happy Easter! Happy Passover! Happy Happy!!!

Poem #21 -- Overheard

WHAT BILLY COLLINS SAID AFTER THE POETRY READING LAST NIGHT

The reason there is so much bad poetry written

is that the tools of poetry are so accessible --

with pencil and paper anyone can write a poem,

unlike, say, playing the saxophone,

which requires the instrument and some lessons.

And who could just go out and start hacking

at a block of marble and make a sculpture on the first try?

The training for writing poetry is in the library.

Reading.

Reading poetry.

Reading deeply.

And you find your voice by 

being jealous of other poets.

By reading other poets.

You write poetry because of 

an urge to emulate,

to imitate.

No copyright on these words, folks, because Billy Collins said them -- I just wrote them down. What he said about bad poetry...ouch. I feel like a poser with this "tra-la-la, I'll write a poem a day" project. And yet, what he said about reading poetry, and the urge to emulate...I do that! I have nearly every book of poetry he's published, plus one long and two short shelves of other poetry books (not to mention Amy LV's The Poem Farm, the weekly impromptu anthology known as Poetry Friday, and The Writer's Almanac). 

Billy Collins has a new book of poetry, published just this month:

Horoscopes for the Dead

And now I have a whole new slew of favorite Collins poems, such as the five-liner that made the crowd burst into laughter, the one that riffs off a comment overheard in a restaurant ("I was like give me a break"), the one about having a hangover and listening to kids playing Marco Polo, the poem about memorizing a poem.