"Man in Space"

11 April 2017:

"All you have to do is listen to the way a man
sometimes talks to his wife at a table of people
and notice how intent he is on making his point
even though her lower lip is beginning to quiver,

and you will know why the women in science
fiction movies who inhabit a planet of their own
are not pictured making a salad or reading a magazine
when the men from earth arrive in their rocket,

why they are always standing in a semicircle
with their arms folded, their bare legs set apart,
their breasts protected by hard metal disks." --Billy Collins, "Man in Space"

I hadn't heard this poem before, so I was delighted to hear it today while driving home from running errands. Well done, Billy Collins.

"Poems bite. And my poems are bitey."

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Kay Ryan, our new poet laurete. Time has an interesting little piece on Ryan and the laureteship in general.

I especially like this observation from Billy Collins, whose work I've always enjoyed: "'Suddenly you're asked to stop looking at specifics — I mean, I write about saltshakers and knives and forks — and talk like a politician,' Collins says. 'You're asked to leave right side of brain and live in left side.'"

Then there are a couple of great quotations from Ryan herself: "'But I'm ready to be interrupted,' she says. 'I'm getting tired of myself, tired of inflicting myself on myself. I'm ready to inflict myself on others.'"

You know how you know she's good people? She talks about happily teaching developmental writing for thirty years--one of the hardest jobs is academia: "'It was mainly second-language students and students who lost their way in school," Ryan says. 'They wanted something that I could help them get: an understanding of the basic elements of grammar, pronouns, those pesky apostrophes. The goal was to write an effective paragraph that was coherent and well supported. We aspired to the semicolon, but that rarely happened.'"

As the article makes clear, though, the job isn't exactly without pressure, pressure that Ryan is already feeling: "But the stress of becoming America's ambassador of poetry is already keeping her up at night. 'I just lie in bed rigidly,' she says, 'and I think about how I have moved from a condition where the world can humiliate me to one where I can humiliate myself. And let down other poets.'"

The title from the post, by the way, is another quotation from Ryan--a particularly fanstastic one, I think. What a great way to describe to students how poetic language works.