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Gray’s Anomaly

You’re a judge in a major poetry competition. How would you rate this entry?

In the construction of the human body
it would appear
essential,
in the first place,
to provide some dense and solid texture capable
of giving supportollins
and attachment
to the softer parts of the frame,
and at the same time to protect in closed cavities
the more important
vital organs,
and such structure we find provided
in the various bones
which form is called
the Skeleton.

Relax. It didn’t win. I think it came second, not bad for a piece of prose. It’s the opening paragraph of Gray’s Anatomy, with the words reset in fashionably irregular lines. It was submitted as a joke, although not by Gray (1827–61). But it changed my view of modern poetry. Whenever I saw verse that was ragged on the right, like this by Ezra Pound:

See, they return; ah, see the tentative
Movements, and the slow feet,
The trouble in the pace and the uncertain
Wavering!

– my brain did a Reverse Gray’s, and got:

See, they return; ah, see the tentative movements, and the slow
feet, the trouble in the pace and the uncertain wavering!

Piece of cake. What’s more, if the key to success in modern poetry is a ragged right, I reckon I can zigzag with the best of them. Get a load of this:

A score of headstones
still stand.
Not in lines, and not chiselled
professional slabs; just natural stone
pointers
fixed here and there in the
ground.

I knocked that off in five minutes. It’s the ending of my novel Kentucky Blues, a lengthy work, so there’s plenty more where that came from.

For years, then, I skipped modern poetry – until I discovered Billy Collins. Cue thunder and lightning! Now I’d walk backwards across town in a blizzard to buy the latest book of Billy Collins’s poems.

His gift is to visit the familiar and reveal the outlandish. My lazy imagination wonders what lies behind that door, down that road, beyond that p

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You’re a judge in a major poetry competition. How would you rate this entry?

In the construction of the human body it would appear essential, in the first place, to provide some dense and solid texture capable of giving supportollins and attachment to the softer parts of the frame, and at the same time to protect in closed cavities the more important vital organs, and such structure we find provided in the various bones which form is called the Skeleton.
Relax. It didn’t win. I think it came second, not bad for a piece of prose. It’s the opening paragraph of Gray’s Anatomy, with the words reset in fashionably irregular lines. It was submitted as a joke, although not by Gray (1827–61). But it changed my view of modern poetry. Whenever I saw verse that was ragged on the right, like this by Ezra Pound:
See, they return; ah, see the tentative Movements, and the slow feet, The trouble in the pace and the uncertain Wavering!
– my brain did a Reverse Gray’s, and got:
See, they return; ah, see the tentative movements, and the slow feet, the trouble in the pace and the uncertain wavering!
Piece of cake. What’s more, if the key to success in modern poetry is a ragged right, I reckon I can zigzag with the best of them. Get a load of this:
A score of headstones still stand. Not in lines, and not chiselled professional slabs; just natural stone pointers fixed here and there in the ground.
I knocked that off in five minutes. It’s the ending of my novel Kentucky Blues, a lengthy work, so there’s plenty more where that came from. For years, then, I skipped modern poetry – until I discovered Billy Collins. Cue thunder and lightning! Now I’d walk backwards across town in a blizzard to buy the latest book of Billy Collins’s poems. His gift is to visit the familiar and reveal the outlandish. My lazy imagination wonders what lies behind that door, down that road, beyond that picture. Collins goes there. He’s a permanent trespasser on parallel worlds, making short expeditions and reaching offbeat conclusions. His ‘Advice to Writers’ begins:
Even if it keeps you up all night, wash down the walls and scrub the floor of your study before composing a syllable.
And every writer who has postponed work to make more coffee will recognize his continuing advice (‘do not hesitate to take/to the open fields that scour the undersides/of rocks. . .’) so that when you come home to ‘the immaculate altar of your desk’, you can select a pencil and ‘cover the pages with tiny sentences’:
like long rows of devoted ants that followed you in from the woods.
Wildlife bores will reject that concept of loyalty in ants. Copy-editors will point out that by the time the ants hiked in from the woods, you would have stopped writing, sold the house and moved to Wyoming. None of that matters. Billy Collins has a rare ability to leapfrog commonsense and arrive at a delightfully unexpected truth. In a poem that’s notionally about insomnia, he is standing on the wet grass in his bare feet, ‘an animal in pajamas’, when
the moon, looking like the top of Shakespeare’s famous forehead, appeared, quite unexpectedly.
The spelling of ‘pajamas’ tells you that Collins is American; in fact he was Poet Laureate of the United States for 2001–3. (It’s not a lifetime job in the US. Very wise.) He has the easy conversational style of good American writers: deceptively easy, because he’s a short-story-teller as well as a poet. ‘Man in Space’ starts with ‘the way a man/sometimes talks to his wife at a table of people’ and ends, eleven lines later, explaining why women in science-fiction movies
. . . are always standing in a semicircle with their arms folded, their bare legs set apart, their breasts protected by hard metal disks.
I’m hooked by the way Collins starts with the ordinary, the instantly recognizable, and strolls off with me in tow. Take ‘I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey’s Version of “Three Blind Mice”’. He begins:
And I start wondering how they came to be blind. If it was congenital, they could be brothers and sisters, and I think of the poor mother brooding over her sightless young triplets.
Then questions arise. How made blind? An accident? Being blind, how did they find each other? How run after the farmer’s wife?
Just so she could cut off their tails with a carving knife, is the cynic’s answer, but the thought of them without eyes and now without tails to trail through the moist grass
– it accounts for the wet stinging in his eyes –
though Freddie Hubbard’s mournful trumpet in ‘Blue Moon’ which happens to be the next cut, cannot be said to be making matters any better.
One of his longer poems (four and a half pages) is ‘Victoria’s Secret’, where he explores the pictures in this lingerie catalogue, much favoured by male readers. The first model ‘is giving me a look/ that says I know you are here’:
She is wearing a deeply scalloped flame-stitch halter top with padded push-up styling and easy side-zip tap pants.
As Collins turns the pages, tension builds. The one ‘reclining/in a satin and lace merry widow/with an inset lace-up front’ has ‘a slightly contorted expression’:
as if she had stepped on a tack just as I was breaking down her bedroom door with my shoulder.
Then there is the one ‘stretched out catlike on a couch/in the warm glow of a panelled library’:
Go ahead, her expression tells me, take off my satin charmeuse gown with a sheer jacquard bodice decorated with a touch of shimmering Lurex. Go ahead, fling it in the fireplace. What do I care, her eyes say, we’re all going to hell anyway.
After that it gets a bit torrid. Eventually Collins hasn’t time for it:
Life is rushing by like a mad, swollen river. One minute roses are opening in the garden and the next, snow is flying past my window.
Underwear catalogues, science-fiction movies, three blind mice: Collins ranges widely. The first five poems in one collection are about barking dogs, walking across the Atlantic, night-time driving with animals, travel photographs and hunger. The next five are called ‘Winter Syntax’; ‘Plight of the Troubadour’; ‘Books’; ‘Death’; and ‘Earthling’, which is about ‘those scales in planetariums/that tell you how much you/would weigh on other planets’:
Imagine squatting in the wasteland of Pluto, all five tons of you, or wandering around Mercury wondering what next to do with your ounce.
Is Billy Collins for everybody? Nobody is for everybody. A writer who tries to be universally popular ends up taking no risks. Collins gambles in every poem; which is good. He surprises me, makes me smile, sometimes laugh. I enjoy his modest, gentle subversion. I was wrong to dismiss all of modern verse. Billy Collins is the exception.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 17 © Derek Robinson 2008


About the contributor

Derek Robinson’s fiction is about wartime aircrew or white-collar fraud. The picture on his website (www.derekrobinson.info) looks, his friends say, like a benevolent Balkans dictator, so it could be worse.

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