This post is one of a series. The notes were written for the book club, Finding Poetry, which I run with Griffin Books, Penarth (https://www.griffinbooksonline.co.uk). The first book I recommended (in February 2021) was ‘Taking off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes’ by Billy Collins.
Billy Collins
eschews semi-colons
and other formal devices.
He writes about mices.
‘Snow’ comes from Collins’s collection, ‘Picnic, Lightning’, and also appears in ‘Taking off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes’. It’s the second poem at this link:
There are no mices in this poem. The poet is listening to jazz and looking out of the window. Everything seems right with the world — the weather, a snowfall, seems perfectly suited to the music, a piano piece by Thelonius Monk. But on reflection, the poet realises that music is so good it would go with other kinds of weather, and the weather is so beautiful it would go with other kinds of music, or indeed with total silence. A study in contentment, you could say.
So much for waterskiing past the poem, as Collins recommends in his well-known poem ‘Introduction to Poetry’. One thing that this speeding-by paraphrase reveals is that the poem happens in real time. What the poem is about and the poem itself are in step — the poem relates a sequence of thoughts that take a couple of minutes. This in itself seems similar to the jazz, whose composition (improvisation) and happening and experience are together in time.
Collins is not a poet who uses rhyme, but perhaps the first stanza is an exception, with the soft rhymes for snow (slow, solo, go) mirroring the irregular falling of the flakes (and the irregular falling of the notes).
The poem is just three well-punctuated, well-structured sentences, divided into 6 or 7 stanzas or paragraphs (the page-break in the book doesn’t allow an accurate count) according to topic shifts, and the line breaks all come at phrase boundaries. This is true throughout the poem, and to a large extent throughout Collins’s oeuvre.
The language is not compressed, rather it uses relaxed conversational devices: ‘I cannot help noticing’; ‘Then again’; ‘and for that matter’; ‘I have a feeling’….. The rivers of idiom are flowing freely, as Collins puts it in ‘Consolation’. Why? To control tone. I think tone is a key to Collins, though I find it quite hard to analyse. It’s usually defined as the aspect of the language that communicates the author’s attitude to the subject matter, or to themselves, or to the reader. But of course the meaning does that to a large extent, so it’s rather the colouring of that meaning, especially important when there’s some kind of mismatch between what is being said and the poet’s apparent attitude to it. Perhaps in this poem it’s that what is being said is rather cerebral and intellectual, but the tone shows that the poet is relaxed about it, passes it off naively, casually, even if it’s (as we’ll see) quite profound.
Returning to the poem’s forward movement, this begins with the snow falling; having done this mimetically with those rhymes, next Collins uses details to put an image in our head. The fence is vivid, isn’t it? — because we can so readily picture snow on a wooden fence, it’s a very characteristic and familiar visual effect.
Now we reach stanza 3, ‘As if he had imagined a winter scene’. I think this stanza makes a point about art in general, how (often) when it’s fully appreciated it allows you to look into the mind of the artist, to follow the artist’s thoughts. It’s intimate in this respect. And in a similar way, the poem makes us feel intimate with the poet. In the awful cliché, he’s ‘shared something with us’ — but not something about his biography, rather something about the way a transitory experience unfolds. His, and maybe ours.
(By the way, the Five Spot is the club mentioned in Frank O’Hara’s ‘The Day Lady Died’.)
‘Then again…’ and the other kinds of weather — it’s odd, isn’t it, a ‘tumult of leaves’? The generally plain language is a ground on which an unusual expression stands out, itself a little tumult.
‘and for that matter’, the other kinds of music — they’re humorous choices. They sound humorous (whether or not you happen to know the bands) — they push the idea of anything-would-do but also they undercut the poem’s calm, just for a moment.
Finally, the silence, and the stirring spoon here is another brilliantly chosen perceptual detail. How do you create an image for silence? You have to illustrate the absence of sound, and if the sound that’s absent is slight, the description is more vivid!
The idea that we can perceive absence, that absence is itself a thing, is one of the ideas in Sartre’s work that gives it its title, ‘Being and nothingness’. It looks at first as though, as with the Destroyers, Collins chose to mention this book as a kind of joke, or merely to match the silence. It’s the nothing that contrasts with the newspaper’s everything. And maybe that’s right, but at the risk of being pretentious, we can note that one of Sartre’s main projects was to distinguish two modes of being — a kind of unconscious ‘being-in-itself’, centred on facticity (here with the music and the snow), and a conscious ‘being-for-itself’ that moves, transcendentally, beyond the current situation, entertaining counterfactuals. Exactly as the poem has illustrated.
Stephen Payne 