click book
Picnic, Lightning
by
Billy Collins

    I sense that Collins feels challenged by the romantics and their Sublime.
Yeats says that "A poet . . . never speaks directly, as to someone at the
breakfast table." In response, Collins places his reader just there, holding
a spoon dripping milk, in his poem "A Portrait of the Reader with a Bowl of
Cereal." Mary Oliver declares, "I write poems for a stranger who will be born
in some distant country hundreds of years from now." To which Collins replies in his "To a Stranger Born in Some Distant Country Hundreds of Years from Now," "I bet nobody there likes a wet dog either. / I bet everybody in your pub, / even the children, pushes her away."

    There is a deliberate decision here to find the lightning only in the
picnic of life, and never to try and live in the lightning, or the light, or
in those ghostly spheres only the soul knows. The book's title comes from
Lolita: "My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic,
lightning) when I was three." That offhand collision of the extraordinary
with the expected comes as offhandedly in Collins as it does in good
contemporary poets, and is the heart of his book. Collins imagines himself
shoveling snow alongside Buddha; illustrates his journal with Leonardo-like
"inventions so original and visionary" they leave him completely bamboozled; describes in "Musée des Beaux Arts Revisited" how "the truly monstrous / lies not so much in the wildly shocking, / [. . .] "but in the small prosaic
touch."

    In fact Collins carries on a conversation with other voices throughout
the book. In "Splitting Wood," he says, "Frost covered this decades ago, /
and frost will cover it again tonight." Li Po writes about a mountaintop monk
who reveals a ten-thousand-mile-heart. In "In the Room of a Thousand Miles,"
Collins says, "I like writing about where I am, / where I happen to be
sitting, / the humidity or the clouds, / the scene outside the window–." "And
then–just between you and me– / I take a swallow of cold tea / and in the
manner of the ancient Chinese / pick up my thin pen / and write down that
bird I hear outside, / the one that sings, / pauses, / then sings again." It
is not merely a transposition of iced tea "or a small glass of whiskey," for
the hot green tea of the ancients, of our world for theirs, but our whole
unsentimental twentieth century vision for theirs. Where Li Po mentions a
thousand eras lost to wind, (in David Hinton's translation), a thousand
blossoms, ten-thousand-mile winds, joy that lasts a thousand years, the
thousand-fold mountain Autumn River peaks, Collins shuns "the world beyond [his] inkwell." For Li Po, exaggeration has a purpose which is more than to represent poetically the beauty, grandeur, and isolation of a mountainous wilderness that he actually saw. For him it is a touchstone for what lies beyond. He writes, "azure heaven– if I could reach it, I could / sail away who knows where on the Star River." For Collins, there is no Star River. Li Po drinks emerald wine, and knows "the Buddha-mystery." Collins likes that contemplation, and that consideration of detail–and he will let his
imagination wander--but he himself will go no farther than his eye and ear
can go.

    There is much room for fancy, even fantasy in Collins, but there is no
room for the fantastic, or the fairy tale, or what lies beyond the mundane
but fascinating world, where human inhabitants quest endlessly (as he quotes
from Beckett) "to bring together in the same instant a ray of sunshine and a
free bench." Lightning may be seen, but only within ordinary life, in
fishing, in reading, in picnics. In an afternoon spent with Irish cows.

        Then later, I would open the blue front door,
        and again the field would be full of their munching,
        or they would be lying down
        on the black and white maps of their sides,
        facing in all directions, waiting for rain.
        How mysterious, how patient and dumbfounded
        they appeared in the long quiet of the afternoons.

        But every once in a while, one of them
        would let out a sound so phenomenal
        that I would put down the paper
        or the knife I was cutting an apple with
        and walk across the road to the stone wall
        to see which one of them was being torched
        or pierced through the side with a long spear.  

    Collins hears Art Blakey's version of "Three Blind Mice" and wonders how
those mice came to be blind. Against nostalgia, he writes "Lines Composed
Over Three Thousand Miles from Tintern Abbey." "Nothing will be as it was / a few hours ago, back in the glorious past / before our naps, back in the
Golden Age / that drew to a close sometime shortly after lunch." Ironically,
he follows that poem soon after with "Home Again," one of his most
sentimental poems, an ode to the possessions he returns to after a voyage.

    And then there are the small fantasies. In "Bonsai," he imagine a world
in miniature, down to a tea-cup ocean and a tiny whale. In "Taking Off Emily
Dickinson's Clothes," he, well, strips the old romantic maid of tippet,
bonnet, and corset. "Egypt" is a perfect example of how piercing the
lightning can be:

        I will lie at the bottom of the desert
        for a thousand years.
        I will wait there until a young archaeologist

        comes to dig for me,
        unwraps the leathery ball of my head
        and sweeps the sand from my face with her delicate brush.

    There is a lot of fun in the world of Picnic, Lightning, honest fun, with
all the magic to be found in a world that compounds Victoria's Secret with
the Sphinx, Aristotle and Irish cows.

BRAD BOSTIAN is a contributing editor for ForPoetry.com  His poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including The Alaska Quarterly Review and Rattle.

Click here to read Billy Collins' poem, "Morning".

                   
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