More Poetry Fun

For my creative writing class, we have to thumb through our text book, Poets of the New Century, and select different poets whose work we are drawn to and really like, and write one page (single-spaced, size 12 Times New Roman font) responses that analyze the pieces and describe why you are drawn to them.

One of the poets who really struck me was Billy Collins. There are five of his pieces in the anthology, all of them so wonderful that, if it were practical, I would post them all for you. Instead, I will just post one, Genius, and then give you links to the rest to read at your leisure.

Genius

is standing by the stove in a bathrobe
stirring the soup with a long wooden spoon.

Earlier in the afternoon he was busy
in the margins of a heavy book

and tonight he will step inside a molecule
or wade into the deep pool of calculus.

But now there is only the pot of vegetable soup,
the circling of the spoon,

the easy rotation of the wrist
and the aroma of onion, bay, and rosemary -

just the kind of moment when a brainstorm
might roll in over the ridge of the valley.

Not when you are holding your head in your hands,
but when you are cutting carrots,

troweling soil into a clay pot,
or washing a glass in the sink,

You look up and see a cloud in the window,
and then there is only you,

the glass underwater, and the cloud -
now clearly in the shape of an astonishing idea.

The rest of the poems are as follows:
The Country, a lovely poem of a mouse and his interactions with a match.
Absence, an anthropomorphic look at chess pieces.
Velocity, the thoughts of a wannabe journalist
and Today, a perfect spring day with a twist.