Looking
into Poems Looking
into Poems
Poetry Column for Chips, Luther College Student Newspaper
Luther College, Decorah, Iowa
By Carol Gilbertson, Dennis M. Jones Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Humanities, 2002-04
September 26, 2002: Billy Collins, "The Names," reproduced at: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/poems/july-dec02/collins_9-6.html.
Sample Section:
Poems take on all life situations--joys, fears, memories, and sorrows. They can be about almost anything: eating, dreaming, musing, studying, lovemaking, philosophizing. You name it. Poets write poems about mowing the lawn or cutting their hair, about strolling the Acropolis or riding a bike in Iowa. They write poems about dead animals, about famous art pieces or the daily stock market report, about vacations at the lake, about torture methods and war atrocities. They write poems asking "Who am I?" or "Why don't you love me?"
After the September 11th attack, people in Manhattan offices viewing the destruction and people all over America watching the TV images clicked their web browsers seeking poems that would speak to their terror and grief. Poets wrote moving poems in response to the attack, and many are reprinted on the Internet or available in September 11th collections at online bookstores.
The U. S. Poet Laureate (the officially-named national poet-at-large), Billy Collins, wrote a poem called "The Names," which he read before the joint session of Congress in New York on September 6. The poet awakes on a rainy night and finds himself reciting alphabetically the names of those who died in the World Trade Center attack, which seem to fall like raindrops or print themselves on the night sky like stars. In the morning, he walks barefoot into a garden, and the names emerge on the dewdrops and flower petals. Eventually, as he moves through the alphabet from "Ackerman" to "Ziminsky," the whole world seems inscribed. The names are words written on awnings, T-shirts, and tattooed arms. The names become first physical objects lifted and blown by the wind or falling into jigsaw pieces in the underbrush, then tiny dancing letters on a pinhead, then banners stretched across bridges or lining the clouds. The poem's metaphorical images accrue toward an emotional crescendo, and the poet concludes:
Alphabet of names in green rows in a field.
Names in the small tracks of birds.
Names lifted from a hat
Or balanced on the tip of the tongue.
Names wheeled into the dim warehouse of memory.
So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.Watching people read through the names of the dead at the first-year anniversary commemoration this September 11th, many of us, like Collins, felt that the sheer volume of names would have to be boxed up and wheeled into our memories on moving van dollies. How will we remember them all?
Can poetry like this speak to your life? I think it can. My task this year and next, as the Dennis M. Jones Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Humanities, is to give you a chance to find out. I'll reproduce some poems and talk about them in this column. I'll have conversations with some of you about poems that address what you study in your classes, whether it's Health, Chemistry, or Sociology.
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