The Art of Drowning

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The Art of Drowning

By Billy Collins, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995, 95 pages
Reviewed By Kent d Curry
April 10, 2000

In honor of National Poetry Month, I’ll now dive off a high, public point without the slightest qualification to expound on a secret interest: I read (some) contemporary poetry (every so often) (when no one’s looking).

As best I can tell, poetry has never been "in fashion" with middle America. Sure, we’ll recognize and read some of the all-timers – Yeats and Keats (pronounced differently, as the Irish and English are always asymmetrical), Longfellow and Whitman, Byron and Tennyson, Donne and Milton – in some English Lit class, but who, besides the most literary, knows anything about the current milieu? More importantly, who can understand them?

Indeed, why buy poetry at all? Americans like bargains of bigness. Yet, for $14, poetry will give you 90 word-splattered pages by an unknown who, often as not, will be purposely incomprehensible in the name of "art."

Behold! I now present an understandable contemporary poet!

I "discovered" Billy Collins through an NPR interview about a year ago. I found his thoughts sensible and his poems touching. Soon, I was sneaking over to the local bookstore to steal through his books in a remote, dusty corner. Their lively beauty convinced me to snag three over the following months.

The strength of these poems is that his lines and loves are not garbled phrases and random words supposedly housing greater meaning. Instead, they’re clean and sinuous, allowing you to think, imagine or breathe. Eschewing rhyme, Collins allows ideas to power his verse forward. He muses about why Gabriel will use a trumpet to raise the dead in The Invention of the Saxophone:

An angel playing the world’s last song,
on a glistening saxophone might be enough
to lift them back into the light of the earth,
but really no farther.

Or unexpectedly compares a Thesaurus to a family reunion:

Here father is next to sire and brother close
to sibling, separated only by fine shades of meaning.
And every group has its odd cousin, the one
who traveled the farthest to be here:
astereognosis, polydipsia, or some eleven
syllable, unpronounceable substitute for the word tool.
Even their own relatives have to squint at their name tags.

before veering into an exploration of why and what type of people congregate, and what type don't.

Yes, there are few lines of rapturous grace, but neither are they stringent or taxing, obtuse to the point of snobbery. Instead, he shares straightforward American observation and insight, ideas that resonate in today’s world to those willing to listen, linger, and live. The titles in the book belie this truth: The Biography of a Cloud, Dancing Toward Bethlehem, and Sunday Morning with the Sensational Nightingales.

Ultimately, poetry is about remembering the forgotten, seeing the unnoticed, and dreaming the unimagined. When you’re not too busy, you begin appreciating this. Sometimes truth comes in the small thin paperbacks of life.

ninetyandnine.com

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Kent d Curry is an Executive Editor of ninetyandnine.com.

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