The Lighter Side of Life

While it’s true most poetry is generally thought of as being fairly serious or as a genre more in tune with tackling the larger human emotions of love, longing, yearning, mourning, or commemoration, I love poems that have the ability to strike your funny bone. Billy Collins is perhaps my favorite contemporary writer of such verse and I was happy when, in 2001 he was named U.S. Poet Laureate, if only so that others may have been able to experience his humor and general grace. It makes me wonder if Emily Dickenson ever wrote a silly ditty, a book of jokes or something else that we have yet to discover. I can see her now, staring out her window laughing at some foolish irony that caught her eye.


Here is a Collins poem I admire most for his humor, especially when he reads it aloud, in a dry, flat tone as if he is trying to bait the audience into thinking this is a serious and dramatic narrative on aging. Hilarious:

The Golden Years
by Billy Collins

All I do these drawn-out days
is sit in my kitchen at Pheasant Ridge
where there are no pheasants to be seen
and last time I looked, no ridge.

I could drive over to Quail Falls
and spend the day there playing bridge,
but the lack of a falls and the absence of quail
would only remind me of Pheasant Ridge.

I know a widow at Fox Run
and another with a condo at Smokey Ledge.
One of them smokes, and neither can run,
so I’ll stick to the pledge I made to Midge.

Who frightened the fox and bulldozed the ledge?
I ask in my kitchen at Pheasant Ridge.

Published at: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/278


As for me, I spent most of my day thinking about a poem I'm working on and realized that some days you just feel more lighthearted and want to sit around and watch college football and make something delicious to eat. While my fairly serious poem was on my mind, it wasn’t until watching my hometown Eugene Oregon Ducks play their game today that I remembered that poetry can be funny too, particularly after an ad for a very important piece of Duck label outerwear that inspired this piece written today:

An Ode to Fall

An hour into the football game,
the chill of too conditioned air hit my face,
and neck and feet and even my hair.
Summer is over, gone without a trace.

It felt like too much work to reach
for the hooded sweatshirt draped over the couch
and my former struggle with the blanket at my feet
dissuaded me from further entanglement.

Then I remembered the ad from earlier in the day--
a perfectly groomed male model wrapped toga style
head to toe in his Duck Snuggie, Roman Godlike, in a way.

As I reached for my phone to order one, I recalled
the Halloween I went out bound in a roll of red paper—
a crayon complete with that conical sharpened headdress of mine
and wondered how on earth the model would relieve himself at halftime?
So I put down the phone in favor of socks
And up-ticked the temp on my thermostat box.

Nicole Speulda 9/19/09

To view (or purchase) the “official” Oregon Duck Snuggie, feel free to click on the following:
http://www.shop.com/Oregon+Ducks+Green+Team+Logo+Print+Unisex+Snuggie+Blanket-239946636-p+.xhtml

Finally, here is another Collins work that makes me smile:

Fishing on the Susquehanna in July
by Billy Collins

I have never been fishing on the Susquehanna
or on any river for that matter
to be perfectly honest.

Not in July or any month
have I had the pleasure--if it is a pleasure--
of fishing on the Susquehanna.

I am more likely to be found
in a quiet room like this one--
a painting of a woman on the wall,

a bowl of tangerines on the table--
trying to manufacture the sensation
of fishing on the Susquehanna.

There is little doubt
that others have been fishing
on the Susquehanna,

rowing upstream in a wooden boat,
sliding the oars under the water
then raising them to drip in the light.

But the nearest I have ever come to
fishing on the Susquehanna
was one afternoon in a museum in Philadelphia

when I balanced a little egg of time
in front of a painting
in which that river curled around a bend

under a blue cloud-ruffled sky,
dense trees along the banks,
and a fellow with a red bandanna

sitting in a small, green
flat-bottom boat
holding the thin whip of a pole.

That is something I am unlikely
ever to do, I remember
saying to myself and the person next to me.

Then I blinked and moved on
to other American scenes
of haystacks, water whitening over rocks,

even one of a brown hare
who seemed so wired with alertness
I imagined him springing right out of the frame.