PRAISE FOR Sailing Alone Around the Room
“Collins’s new greatest hits collection, Sailing Alone Around the Room, is certainly hospitable. There are brainy, observant, spit-shined moments on almost every page.… You finish [it] feeling pleased that such a sensible and gifted man is America’s poet laureate—young writers have plenty to learn from his clarity and apparent ease.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Collins uses ordinary words … and his sentences have the cadences of speech. They usually start with plain statements … then something strange happens. A rocket goes off, images burst out like fireworks, and life’s backyard becomes a magic kingdom.… Collins is often very funny—but more startling than the wit is the way his mind makes unexpected leaps and splices.”
—The Boston Globe
“Collins’s new and selected poems shows how he attracts such a vast audience: by offering a pleasant tune sung in a pleasant way.… He is master of the everyday.… Collins reveals the unexpected within the ordinary. He peels back the surface of the humdrum to make the moment new.”
—The Christian Science Monitor
“Like a master jazz trumpeter, Collins takes quirky, imaginative leaps that are as stunning for their coherence as their originality.… Collins’s popularity hinges on the accessibility of his poems and their mildly subversive quality. The vast majority are written in the first person, in the colloquial, richly perceptive tradition of William Carlos Williams.… So obviously a virtuoso, Billy Collins is sure to bring many new readers to poetry.”
—The Washington Post Book World
“To begin with, Collins is absolutely charming. He deserves every rose he’s flung these days.… His poems are irresistible. Deceptively simple and gentle, they wrap their friendly arms around you, tell you a joke, pour you a drink and then usher you into a banquet of images and ideas.”
—Minneapolis Star-Tribune
“[Collins] writes out … one of the major poetic scripts of our time: the one that finds transcendence in the ordinary, and sings hymns to the banal. The most obvious thing to say about Collins’s poetry is that it is funny, in an accessible and immediately familiar way. But his true poetic gift is something more than a sense of humor; it is a genuine, often debased, wit.… At its most powerful, this kind of wit is truly creative: if, as Emerson said, every word began life as a metaphor, wit resurrects the metaphor hiding in ordinary words.”
—The New Republic
“Collins has reached into so many unexplored corners that he has elevated the mundane, not out of proportion to the world, but to a place where it seems to have always belonged.”
—The Miami Herald
“Often, Collins will use the most mundane of subjects as a starting point for his work … but then he’ll take the poem to somewhere strange, marvelous and emotionally resonant.”
—The Chicago Tribune
“Because he is so accessible, there is a tendency to underrate Collins, but there is an intellectual challenge to most of his work.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“[Collins’s] poetry insistently appeals to the mainstream. It brims with shared confidences, speaking softly and inviting the reader to come a little closer to the page. He does not write above or below his audience, but right at them. He engages us in intimate conversation.”
—The Dallas Morning News
“The surface structure of these poems appears simplistic, but subtle changes in tone or gesture move the reader from the mundane to the sublime.… The results are accessible, but not trite, comical but not laughable, and well crafted but not overly flamboyant.… This volume belongs in every library.”
—Library Journal
BILLY COLLINS is the author of six
collections of poetry, including Sailing
Alone Around the Room; Questions About
Angels; The Art of Drowning; and Picnic,
Lightning, and is the editor of Poetry
180: A Turning Back to Poetry. He is a
Distinguished Professor of English at
Lehman College of the City
University of New York. He was
appointed Poet Laureate of the
United States for 2001–2003.
ALSO BY BILLY COLLINS
Poetry 180 (editor)
Picnic, Lightning
The Best Cigarette (CD)
The Art of Drowning
Questions About Angels
The Apple That Astonished Paris
Video Poems
Pokerface
Nine Horses
2002 Random House Trade Paperback Edition
Copyright © 2001 by Billy Collins
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks,
an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New
York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are registered
trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This work was originally published in hardcover by Random House, Inc., in 2001.
Poems from Picnic, Lightning, by Billy Collins, © 1998, are reprinted by
permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press. Poems from The Art
of Drowning, by Billy Collins, ©1995, are reprinted by permission of
the University of Pittsburgh Press. Poems from Questions About Angels,
by Billy Collins, © 1991, are reprinted by permission of the University
of Pittsburgh Press. Poems from The Apple That Astonished Paris, by Billy
Collins, are reprinted by permission of the University of Arkansas
Press. Copyright 1988 by Billy Collins.
Grateful acknowledgments are due to the editors of the following
publications where some of these poems first appeared.
The Atlantic Monthly, “The Iron Bridge,” “Man Listening to Disc,” “Snow
Day”; Crab Orchard Review, “Serenade”; Field, “Idiomatic,” “Scotland”;
Five Points, “Pavilion”; The Gettysburg Review, “Insomnia,” “The Three
Wishes”; The Paris Review, “The Butterfly Effect”; Pif, “The Flight of the
Reader”; Ploughshares, “The Only Day in Existence,” “Tomes”; Poetry,
“Dharma,” “Jealousy,” “Madmen,” “November,” “Reading an Anthology
of Chinese Poems of the Sung Dynasty, I Pause to Admire the Length
and Clarity of Their Titles,” “Sonnet”; The Southern Review, “The
Waitress”; The Times Literary Supplement, “Ignorance”
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Collins, Billy.
Sailing alone around the room: new and selected poems / Billy Collins.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-43174-5
I. Title.
PS3553.047478 S25 2000
811′.54—DC21 99-052861
Random House website address: www.atrandom.com
IN MEMORIAM
Katherine Collins (1901–1997)
William S. Collins (1901–1994)
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Note to the Reader
FROM The Apple That Astonished Paris (1988)
ANOTHER REASON WHY I DON’T KEEP A GUN IN THE HOUSE
WALKING ACROSS THE ATLANTIC
PLIGHT OF THE TROUBADOUR
THE LESSON
WINTER SYNTAX
ADVICE TO WRITERS
THE RIVAL POET
INSOMNIA
EARTHLING
BOOKS
BAR TIME
MY NUMBER
INTRODUCTION TO POETRY
THE BROOKLYN MUSEUM OF ART
SCHOOLSVILLE
FROM Questions About Angels (1991)
AMERICAN SONNET
QUESTIONS ABOUT ANGELS
A HISTORY OF WEATHER
THE DEATH OF ALLEGORY
FORGETFULNESS
CANDLE HAT
STUDENT OF CLOUDS
THE DEAD
THE MAN IN THE MOON
THE WIRES OF THE NIGHT
VADE MECUM
NOT TOUCHING
THE HISTORY TEACHER
FIRST READER
PURITY
NOSTALGIA
FROM The Art of Drowning (1995)
CONSOLATION
OSSO BUCO
DIRECTIONS
SUNDAY MORNING WITH THE SENSATIONAL NIGHTINGALES
THE BEST CIGARETTE
DAYS
TUESDAY, JUNE 4, 1991
CANADA
ON TURNING TEN
WORKSHOP
MY HEART
BUDAPEST
DANCING TOWARD BETHLEHEM
MONDAY MORNING
CENTER
DESIGN
PINUP
PIANO LESSONS
THE BLUES
MAN IN SPACE
NIGHTCLUB
SOME FINAL WORDS
FROM Picnic, Lightning (1998)
FISHING ON THE SUSQUEHANNA IN JULY
TO A STRANGER BORN IN SOME DISTANT COUNTRY HUNDREDS OF YEARS FROM NOW
I CHOP SOME PARSLEY WHILE LISTENING TO ART BLAKEY’S VERSION OF “THREE BLIND MICE”
AFTERNOON WITH IRISH COWS
MARGINALIA
SOME DAYS
PICNIC, LIGHTNING
MORNING
BONSAI
SHOVELING SNOW WITH BUDDHA
SNOW
JAPAN
LINES COMPOSED OVER THREE THOUSAND MILES FROM TINTERN ABBEY
PARADELLE FOR SUSAN
LINES LOST AMONG TREES
TAKING OFF EMILY DICKINSON’S CLOTHES
THE NIGHT HOUSE
SPLITTING WOOD
THE DEATH OF THE HAT
PASSENGERS
WHERE I LIVE
ARISTOTLE
New Poems
DHARMA
READING AN ANTHOLOGY OF CHINESE POEMS OF THE SUNG DYNASTY, I PAUSE TO ADMIRE THE LENGTH AND CLARITY OF THEIR TITLES
SNOW DAY
INSOMNIA
MADMEN
SONNET
IDIOMATIC
THE WAITRESS
THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT
SERENADE
THE THREE WISHES
PAVILION
THE MOVIES
JEALOUSY
TOMES
MAN LISTENING TO DISC
SCOTLAND
NOVEMBER
THE IRON BRIDGE
THE FLIGHT OF THE READER
A Note to the Reader About this Poetry eBook
The way a poem looks on the page is a vital aspect of its being. The length of its lines and the poet’s use of stanza breaks give the poem a physical shape, which guides our reading of the poem and distinguishes it from prose.
With an eBook, this distinct shape may be altered if you choose to take advantage of one of the functions of your eReader by changing the size of the type for greater legibility. Doing this may cause the poem to have line breaks not intended by the poet. To preserve the physical integrity of the poem, we have formatted the eBook so that any words that get bumped down to a new line in the poem will be noticeably indented. This way, you can still appreciate the poem’s original shape regardless of your choice of type size.
FROM
The Apple That
Astonished Paris
(1988)
Another Reason Why I Don’t
Keep a Gun in the House
The neighbors’ dog will not stop barking.
He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark
that he barks every time they leave the house.
They must switch him on on their way out.
The neighbors’ dog will not stop barking.
I close all the windows in the house
and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast
but I can still hear him muffled under the music,
barking, barking, barking,
and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra,
his head raised confidently as if Beethoven
had included a part for barking dog.
When the record finally ends he is still barking,
sitting there in the oboe section barking,
his eyes fixed on the conductor who is
entreating him with his baton
while the other musicians listen in respectful
silence to the famous barking dog solo,
that endless coda that first established
Beethoven as an innovative genius.
Walking Across
the Atlantic
I wait for the holiday crowd to clear the beach
before stepping onto the first wave.
Soon I am walking across the Atlantic
thinking about Spain,
checking for whales, waterspouts.
I feel the water holding up my shifting weight.
Tonight I will sleep on its rocking surface.
But for now I try to imagine what
this must look like to the fish below,
the bottoms of my feet appearing, disappearing.
Plight of the Troubadour
For a good hour I have been singing lays
in langue d’oc to a woman who knows
only langue d’oïl, an odd Picard dialect
at that.
The European love lyric is flourishing
with every tremor of my voice,
yet a friend has had to tap my shoulder
to tell me she has not caught a word.
My sentiments are tangled like kites
in the branches of her incomprehension,
and soon I will be lost in an anthology
and poets will no longer wear hats like mine.
Provence will be nothing more
than a pink hue on a map or an answer on a test.
And still the woman smiles over at me
feigning this look of sisterly understanding.
The Lesson
In the morning when I found History
snoring heavily on the couch,
I took down his overcoat from the rack
and placed its weight over my shoulder blades.
It would protect me on the cold walk
into the village for milk and the paper
and I figured he would not mind,
not after our long conversation the night before.
How unexpected his blustering anger
when I returned covered with icicles,
the way he rummaged through the huge pockets
making sure no major battle or English queen
had fallen out and become lost in the deep snow.
Winter Syntax
A sentence starts out like a lone traveler
heading into a blizzard at midnight,
tilting into the wind, one arm shielding his face,
the tails of his thin coat flapping behind him.
There are easier ways of making sense,
the connoisseurship of gesture, for example.
You hold a girl’s face in your hands like a vase.
You lift a gun from the glove compartment
and toss it out the window into the desert heat.
These cool moments are blazing with silence.
The full moon makes sense. W
hen a cloud crosses it
it becomes as eloquent as a bicycle leaning
outside a drugstore or a dog who sleeps all afternoon
in a corner of the couch.
Bare branches in winter are a form of writing.
The unclothed body is autobiography.
Every lake is a vowel, every island a noun.
But the traveler persists in his misery,
struggling all night through the deepening snow,
leaving a faint alphabet of bootprints
on the white hills and the white floors of valleys,
a message for field mice and passing crows.
At dawn he will spot the vine of smoke
rising from your chimney, and when he stands
before you shivering, draped in sparkling frost,
a smile will appear in the beard of icicles,
and the man will express a complete thought.
Advice to Writers
Even if it keeps you up all night,
wash down the walls and scrub the floor
of your study before composing a syllable.
Clean the place as if the Pope were on his way.
Spotlessness is the niece of inspiration.
The more you clean, the more brilliant
your writing will be, so do not hesitate to take
to the open fields to scour the undersides
of rocks or swab in the dark forest
upper branches, nests full of eggs.
When you find your way back home
and stow the sponges and brushes under the sink,
you will behold in the light of dawn
the immaculate altar of your desk,
a clean surface in the middle of a clean world.
From a small vase, sparkling blue, lift
a yellow pencil, the sharpest of the bouquet,
and cover pages with tiny sentences
like long rows of devoted ants
that followed you in from the woods.
The Rival Poet
The column of your book titles,
always introducing your latest one,
looms over me like Roman architecture.
It is longer than the name
of an Italian countess, longer
than this poem will probably be.