one of the few things they already know

[thehefner]

So Herr Direktor slaversbane invited me to tell a Hefner Monologue as an opening act before yesterday's production of FAUSTUS (where jcsbimp, not I, would be playing the title role). He thought it would be good experience for working with a crowd, and I agreed. Then the stuff with my father happened.

Right around that time, a few days ago, disc_sophist announced that she was giving away an extra ticket to the live performance of A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION (the actual live broadcast, not the movie) at Wolf Trap, at the same time as FAUSTUS. Now, Garrison Keillor is one of my true heroes, alongside Christopher Titus, Billy Collins, Denis Leary, Spalding Gray, and Bill Cosby, and I've attended love Wolf Trap performances of his at least twice in the past.

So after much conflict, I decided to go ahead and do the Hefner Monologue. I reasoned that it'd be better for me to get experience doing the thing I love, getting up on that stage and throwing myself into it, and that I'd certainly see Keillor again someday. It was a tough decision, but that's what I decided upon. And besides, I don't like Wolf Trap. Too crowded, and in 95 degree muggy DC-area weather? Gross, no thank you. I would be better off listening to the performance as it happened in my AC-filled car.

So as I turned on the radio, just about to hit the beltway for the commute to Laurel, I hear Keillor and company live from Wolf Trap, where he announced that their special guest that night would be Billy Collins.

Now.

Most of you probably don't know who Billy Collins is (hint: he's NOT Billy Connolly). I wrote about him a while back; he's the former Poet Laureate of the U.S. Now again, I didn't gave a crap about modern poetry for the most part, but when he came to my college to do a reading, I felt obligated to go, since he was kind of a big deal. And I was blown away.

His poetry isn't really all that deep. His poetry will never be studied in schools; there's no real depth to his work or anything. What there is is just a Hemingway-like mastry of simple English, to the purpose of Steven Wright-ish surreal comedic observations on the world. And he's absolutely best when he's performing his poetry. His live CD is introduced by Bill Murray, to give you an idea (which I REALLY need to own).

Let me post some examples of his work here. NOTE: If you hate hate HATE poetry, modern or otherwise... definitely give these a read. Read them aloud, slowly, carefully.

Flock


It has been calculated that each copy of the Gutenberg Bible
required the skins of 300 sheep.

I can see them
squeezed into the holding pen
behind the stone building
where the printing press is housed.

All of them squirming around
to find a little room
and looking so much alike
it would be nearly impossible to count them.

And there is no telling which one of them
will carry the news
that the Lord is a Shepherd,
one of the few things
they already know.




Introduction To Poetry


I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.



Thesaurus

It could be the name of a prehistoric beast
that roamed the Paleozoic earth, rising up
on its hind legs to show off its large vocabulary,
or some lover in a myth who is metamorphosed into a book.

It means treasury, but it is just a place
where words congregate with their relatives,
a big park where hundreds of family reunions
are always being held,
house, home, abode, dwelling, lodgings, and digs,
all sharing the same picnic basket and thermos;
hairy, hirsute, woolly, furry, fleecy, and shaggy
all running a sack race or throwing horseshoes,
inert, static, motionless, fixed and immobile
standing and kneeling in rows for a group photograph.

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.

I can see my own copy up on a high shelf.
I rarely open it, because I know there is no
such thing as a synonym and because I get nervous
around people who always assemble with their own kind,
forming clubs and nailing signs to closed front doors
while others huddle alone in the dark streets.

I would rather see words out on their own, away
from their families and the warehouse of Roget,
wandering the world where they sometimes fall
in love with a completely different word.
Surely, you have seen pairs of them standing forever
next to each other on the same line inside a poem,
a small chapel where weddings like these,
between perfect strangers, can take place.



Man, aren't those great?

So, with that in mind, when Keillor announced Billy Collins as his guest, perhaps you'll understand why (even though I was much, much better off hearing it from my cool car, not watching it from afar on a muggy, crowded, grassy hill) I released a good long "FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!!!!!!!!"

disc_sophist, you lucky whore, you.

Comments

[ortugatay.livejournal.com]

Oh, I love me some Billy Collins. Glad you saw the WC reading--I did too and thought he was really funny and cool.

I'm a fan of his poem "Marginalia" in particular...read that one? If not, I'll hook you up.

[thehefner.livejournal.com]

Please do! :)

[ortugatay.livejournal.com]

Voila.

Marginalia

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."

[adaptor.livejournal.com]

Man, Richards sure has been pissed off at you lately.

"Most of you probably don't know who Billy Collins is (hint: he's NOT Billy Connolly)."

Don't tell him that! ;-)

[thehefner.livejournal.com]

Yes, because Billy is STILL sore about not getting cast in THE BOONDOCK SAINTS.

[jellied.livejournal.com]

Funny, I was listening to that exact broadcast on my way to work this morning.

[thehefner.livejournal.com]

Aw, just think, had I been there, you could have actually heard my voice. I would have been the one going "WA-HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!" when Keillor announced Billy Collins.

[kwsapphire.livejournal.com]

Okay, I really like that first poem. There's a wakeup call in there...

[thehefner.livejournal.com]

What, the sheep one? Me, I found the "Introduction to Poetry" one to be the most compelling, as I'm one who usually has little use for poems that don't at least have some surface level that I can appreciate instantly. I have to wonder how many poems just pass right over my head because I didn't take the time to find out what might be there right underneath the surface.

Which is ironic, considering many, if not most, of Collins' poems are pretty "what you see is what you get." Or so it seems to me.

[kwsapphire.livejournal.com]

I actually like some poetry, personally. Simple, silly kid's stuff is the most fun. And I write my own poetry. But yes, I really like the sheep one.

[jackolantern.livejournal.com]

I loved the bit where he and Keillor are throwing down, trying to rewrite each other--not each other's stories, but each other.

[thehefner.livejournal.com]

I know!! I so want a recording of that! I get free podcasts of "Lake Wobegon," but I'd so want to hear that sketch again. Especially the line where Collins navel-gazes.

[little-dinosaur.livejournal.com]

Hee!

Yeah, I hate poetry a little bit. Or at least, it doesn't interest me at all. But these are a bit wonderful.

[thehefner.livejournal.com]

One more! This is one of my very favorites:

The Revenant

I am the dog you put to sleep,
as you like to call the needle of oblivion,
come back to tell you this simple thing:
I never liked you--not one bit.

When I licked your face,
I thought of biting off your nose.
When I watched you toweling yourself dry,
I wanted to leap and unman you with a snap.

I resented the way you moved,
your lack of animal grace,
the way you would sit in a chair and eat,
a napkin on your lap, knife in your hand.

I would have run away,
but I was too weak, a trick you taught me
while I was learning to sit and heel,
and--greatest of insults--shake hands without a hand.

I admit the sight of the leash
would excite me
but only because it meant I was about
to smell things you had never touched.

You do not want to believe this,
but I have no reason to lie.
I hated the car, the rubber toys,
disliked your friends and, worse, your relatives.

The jingling of my tags drove me mad.
You always scratched me in the wrong place.
All I ever wanted from you
was food and fresh water in my metal bowls.

While you slept, I watched you breathe
as the moon rose in the sky.
It took all my strength
not to raise my head and howl.

Now I am free of the collar,
the yellow raincoat, monogrammed sweater,
the absurdity of your lawn,
and that is all you need to know about this place

except what you already supposed
and are glad it did not happen sooner--
that everyone here can read and write,
the dogs in poetry, the cats and the others in prose.

[little-dinosaur.livejournal.com]

Oh no!
I mean, it's awesome, but I used to have a dog and I sometimes worry that it was like that. I don't think it was. I never felt the need to clothe her or teach her to shake hands, for instance. But I worry anyway.

[disc-sophist.livejournal.com]

Not to rub it in, but just so you know that I'm there with you with the Billy Collins Love: He was brilliant. He did some reading, plus he was a part of several of the sketches. Might be worth trying to dig up the broadcast somewhere. I'll see what I can find, since unlike you, I do not tell stories so much as blurt out random words and hope people already know what I'm talking about.

[disc-sophist.livejournal.com]

p.s. And he read Flock.

[thehefner.livejournal.com]

Hey, as I said in the post, I heard the whole thing! From the comfort of my car, filled with AC! By all accounts, I was far better off. Still, "FUUUUCK!!"

[disc-sophist.livejournal.com]

Ah yes. As I would have seen were my brain able to read in straight lines. *scuttles*

[thehefner.livejournal.com]

Aye, it really was wonderful. I want that line Collins' said in response to Keillor's accusation that poets just navel-gaze.

I do not tell stories so much as blurt out random words and hope people already know what I'm talking about.

Maybe it's the lack of caffeine, but that's a quote for the ages, right there. Or at least one's internet profile.