The Billy Collins Cookbook.
Billy Collins taught me
how to write
poetry
the same way Alison Roman
taught her disciples
to cook :
don’t be fussy.
have fun in the kitchen:
a small room doesn’t mean
small ideas;
experiment:
with different flavours, textures,
be funny, entertain.
I thought I could do that
Above all,
Billy Collins taught me:
be light.
You don’t have to stomp
to be heard.
Raymond who ? she said .
Raymond Carver , I replied , the American
short story writer and poet .
Never heard of him , she said
and being a year eight standard I was inclined
to believe her .
And yet it was startling how Carveresque
her writing was .
Phrases like “ I will never know where — what
shall I call him — this man has gone “
spring particularly to mind .
And I thought of the nine year old boy who wrote
like the Dickens in Pickwick Papers , for instance ;
another who wrote florid full-on verse
like Chris Marlowe
and the highly strung girl who came for one term
and wrote like Emily Bronte
though none had ever read these writers
and the year nine autiste who at times
wrote like them all .
Sylvia who ?
the manic depressive from the back
of the class called
black hair slashed across her face
as I read the opening lines of her poem
to her father
fuelled with fury and neo-Nazi imagery .
Never mind , I said
as I wondered whether the ghosts
of dead writers
had come to inhabit the young
and whether over the next few years
I’d meet an embryonic
Will Shakespeare
an Oscar
or antipodean Dostoevsky .
Collect their juvenilia .
One day I’ll make a killing
*pic courtesy of pinterest
Get your head
out of yr ass,
said my mentor;
all things must pass;
look around;
be here, now;
look at the cows
in the field,
how placid they are
learn what I cannot teach;
imbue the wisdom
of the naked beach
Have you got ants in yr pants? Mum would say
When I fidgeted in bed.
Once the dentist slapped me in the face
When I wouldn’t keep still
During an extraction.
My mind would wander like Wordsworth
When I was a kid.
You’d forget yr head if it wasn’t screwed on
Was a comment
That followed me like a shadow.
You’ve always got yr head in the clouds,
Barked Brother Angus
From his pulpit
During Ancient History lessons.
Well, it’s better than having it stuck up my arse,
I wanted to say.
And now my grand-daughter has been diagnosed with ADHD.
Is it any wonder?.
I was in writing school again.
The teacher, Mr. Wiles, was tall and totemic.
He was disparaging a writer that was currently in the ascendant.
‘His prose is loose and lumpen’, he said. ‘It clumps along the hallway of sentences like Lurch in The Adams Family’
*pic courtesy of Wikipedia
When I was a kid in High School we learnt things ‘off by heart’:
poems by Keats and Coleridge, extracts from ‘The Ancient Mariner’,
soliloquies from ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Macbeth’, whole passages from Dickens;
chronologies of The Persian Wars, War of the Roses,
biographies of the Tudors; not neglecting the sciences, we memorized
physics and maths formulas,chemical equations, and slabs from The New Testament —
we were walking Wikipedias; now I’m a big kid, into my senior years,
I’ve grown rusty, which is why I’m in the backyard walking up and down —-
the bees must think I’m mad —- learning by heart my NEW mobile number
which everyone but me knows
M is in her cups.
Any moment now, the kookaburra cackle
the cutting off, like a hoon driver on the highway.
But for the time being I’m holding the table, telling the tale of the silver hammer beneath the front passenger seat of my car, what happens when my girlfriend spots it.
The little group leans forward, intent.
But it reminds M of something and she’s hyper now, jumps in, raucous.
This time I’m ready for her.
I took a photo today I’d like to show you. It’s for you, I say.
You did? Really?
Yes, I say, bringing it up on the screen, passing it across to her.
It’s what you do when you cut people off, how you make them feel. It’s kind of a metaphor.
She has a close look. Ouch,, she says. Lopped?
Yes, lopped.
I’m walking down aisle #8 but it could be aisle #9, depending how they classify it.
But it’s not down either.
I’m afraid to ask.
I know what sort of response I’m going to get but I’m desperate.
I ask one of the assistants,
So where do you keep it? I ask. Where do you keep the canned laughter?
Pardon? she says.
You’ve got canned fruit and canned veggies but I can’t find the canned laughter.
Is this some kind of joke? she asks.
Sort of, I say, But I do need a can or two.
She looks around for help. You know the look. This guy might be dangerous, I better humour him.
I’ll go and ask the manager, she says.
Don’t worry, I say sadly, no one stocks it any more. She heads off anyway and I slump out the store in my clown shoes and frizzy ginger hair. I beep my red nose for good measure.
No one laughs at my jokes these days. I’ve lost my edge. Looks like I’m going to have to go back to Comedy School.
They were in a little cottage out the back with nothing to write about on a dark and stormy night. Delia, a tall, strapping, Scandinavian woman, with long greyish blond hair down to her waist, had just given them, a small group of seniors, fifteen minutes silent writing during the class on short story writing. You should be able to come up with something, she said,almost despairing of her hopelessly floundering flock. This was the second session and still not a word had been written. The thunder boomed and lightning flashed helpfully as if to provide prompts. Delia paced up and down out the front working herself into a froth.
Just then, as if on cue, the door flew open, and a drug-addled man with straggly blond hair and black tank top stormed in, neck and arms swathed in devil tatts, shouting obscenities in a strange guttural language, throwing chairs around the room thankfully with no one in them, and then with his anger quenched, stormed out again. Where’s Security when you need them, fumed D who immediately phoned the police. Suddenly everyone started furiously writing. Delia could not stop them.
pic by pretty sleepy on pixabay
Some poems start out as poems, homely descriptions
of slippers, for instance or berry bowls, toasters
but then over-reach, chasing chimeras, conundrums,
leading us down a rabbit hole of nonsense.
Others take the easier way, finding their inner teacher,
their gasbagging guru. Some poems start out as poems
but end up as pedagogy. You feel you’re in
the classroom again.
John Malone 