Bring them on!ī He was very immodest about winning them. Billy Collins is a distinguished professor of English at Lehman College, City University of New York, where he?s taught for the past thirty years. Are you going to keep teaching this year?
Billy:
Yes, I?m still teaching. Still lifting the chalk.
Grace:
Working this around it?
Billy:
Yeah, I can seem, so far I can do both at once.
Grace:
You?ve arranged your schedule? Do people have to vie to get into your course?
Billy:
Well not really, I teach in the City University, and many of the students there don?t know who I am but I kind of like it like that. I can find some anonymity there and just concentrate on the teaching.
Grace:
And how many in the English Department.
Billy:
Faculty members, it?s quite large. I?d say maybe sixty or so.
Grace:
That?s pretty impressive. And you teach creative writing?
Billy:
Well, now I do. I taught composition for thirty years because in the city universities...
Grace:
You have to.
Billy:
We teach an immigrant population, for many of whom English is an acquired language, and I?m not a bilingual expert, but I?ve been teaching English as a second language just by the nature of the student body that fills the classrooms. I teach creative writing workshops sometimes, but I also teach regular literature courses.
Grace:
How many courses do you teach? Two?
Billy:
Well, usually three, now I?m teaching two.
Grace:
Three?s a lot.
Billy:
Well, not to a coal miner it isn?t.
Grace:
I know that William Matthews just taught one. You have to put your foot down!
Billy:
We?re going to have to do something about this.
Grace:
Right, now that you?re Poet Laureate.
Billy:
Well, maybe the President of my college is listening.
Grace:
I think he must be thrilled.
Billy:
Or we can send him a tape.
Grace:
I know he?s thrilled that you are the Laureate.
Grace:
Billy Collins he is, and I?m Grace Cavalieri. We?re at the Library of Congress. We?re happy to be here. The program is called "The Poet and the Poem, from the Library of Congress." Tell us about the poem you wrote because you forgot your pencil.
Billy:
Well this is a poem about something that writers are cautioned never to do, which is to go out of the house, to leave home without your little notebook and a pen, just in case you are visited by the muse, and this is a case where I was caught without the implements, and it?s called Lines Lost Among Trees.
These are not the lines that came to me
while walking in the woods
with no pen
and nothing to write on anyway.
They are gone forever,
a handful of coins
dropped through the grate of memory,
along with the ingenious mnemonic
I devised to hold them in place-
all gone and forgotten
before I had returned to the clearing of lawn
in back of our quiet house
with its jars jammed with pens,
its notebooks and reams of blank paper,
its desk and soft lamp,
its table and the light from its windows.
So this is my elegy for them,
those six or eight exhalations,
the braided rope of syntax,
the jazz of the timing,
and the little insight at the end
wagging like the short tail
of a perfectly obedient spaniel
sitting by the door.
This is my envoy to nothing
where I say Go, little poem-
not out into the world of strangers' eyes,
but off to some airy limbo,
home to lost epics,
unremembered names,
and fugitive dreams
such as the one I had last night,
which, like a fantstic city in pencil,
erased itself
in the bright morning air
just as I was waking up.
Grace:
Oh, that fantastic city. Phillip Levine has a wonderful poem, also about forgetting his lines. Do you know that one? And it?s so poignant, because those are the best lines you ever wrote. Are you sure?
Billy:
Oh those are the unwritten, unremembered, lost ...
Grace:
They were the most marvelous333333333¾444444444
Billy:
Yeah. The good ones.
Grace:
Billy Collins. We talked about the high schoolers that were here last night, and you have your own wish to make poetry of significance in high schools. So tell everyone about that.
Billy:
Well, what I?ve started to do as Poet Laureate is a program I?ve called Poetry 180, and 180 stands for the roughly 180 days of the school year, and it also signifies a kind of turning around, to poetry, you might say. The idea is to have a poem read every day in American high schools as part of the public announcements, so that at the end of the public announcements, that would be the best place I think, there would be a poem. And I?m choosing 180 poems, hand picking them. Poems that I think high schoolers will be able to get right away, and that?ll have some immediate resonance for them. The aim here is to make poetry for high school students a feature of daily life, and not just something to be studied, and that?s why I want to encourage teachers to get with the program. And they can do that just by going to the Library of Congress web site and they?ll find the poems there early next year; that?s 2002. But I?d like to discourage teachers from bringing the poems into the classroom and teaching them as they would the other poems in the curriculum. I really just want students to hear these poems, and not have to study them, or write about them, or think about them in a public way. I just want them to simply take a poem in every day. And I?m hoping; my sense is, if a student hears a poem every day, there?s probably one poem out there, at least one, for every student. All it takes is one poem to get you hooked.
Grace:
It follows, somewhat, in the national consciousness, where Pinsky put a poem on the News Hour, and, you know, if you ask the regular Joe on the street, if he watches it, oh yeah, he remembers that, but he may not recall the poem. The fact that it was there, that a poem was on the News Hour, and is forever an indentation in our minds. You?re following the idea that a poem can be read in a school over the PA system is not at all outrageous.
Billy:
Right. Well it?d be part of the public announcements, so you?d here that the volleyball team has a practice at 4:30 or whatever, then you?d hear the poem. It?s putting the poem in a kind of unexpected place. It?s a little like poetry in motion which puts poems on busses and subways, and as you said, a poem popping up on television. We expect to find poems in classrooms and anthologies, but I think when a poem ambushes us, and pops out from an unexpected place or time, it has more of an immediate effect on us.
Grace:
It will get some of the dust off of it too, in our minds. This is Billy Collins, and he is here to read you a poem. And I really hope you get to write one this year.
Billy:
I?d be happy with one, probably
Grace:
How many are you able to write a year?
Billy:
Well, fewer now that I?m so busy doing this Poet Laureate work.
Grace:
But even before what was your ... Howard Nemerov said six a year was about right,
Billy:
Six a year?
Grace:
... And he did it all in a week.
Billy:
He did it in one week and got it all over with ...
Grace:
He had this energy that would just culminate, and he?d sit at the dining room table with the cats,
Billy:
That?s amazing. Well it?s kind of analogous to that ...what they say, that most married couples talk, on the average, 15 minutes a week, and some of them just get it over with on Monday morning.
Billy:
Squeeze it all in. No, I?m more prolific than that. I don?t write ... I write ... my writing is kind of spread out sporadically throughout the year. But I would think, I?ve never really kept tabs333333333¾444444444 calculated the number, but I would say, you know, a couple of month, maybe, or three or four a month.
Grace:
That would be a lot.
Billy:
Yeah.
Grace:
All that you like? You wind up liking all of them?
Billy:
Well, if I don?t like them I just pitch them, so I do like all the ones that I finish.
Grace:
That?s a nice thing to say. What is the latest poem you've finished?
Billy:
It's called The Death of the Hat. It starts out kind of looking nostalgically back at that period of time in the past century, in the twentieth century, when men all wore hats, in cities at least.
Once every man wore a hat.
In the ashen newsreels,
the avenues of cities
are broad rivers flowing with hats.
The ballparks swelled
with thousands of strawhats,
brims and bands,
rows of men smoking
and cheering in shirtsleeves.
Hats were the law.
They went without saying.
You noticed a man without a hat in a crowd.
You bought them from Adams or Dobbs
who branded your initials in gold
on the inside band.
Trolleys crisscrossed the city.
Steamships sailed in and out of the harbor.
Men with hats gathered on the docks.
There was a person to block your hat
and a hatcheck girl to mind it
while you had a drink
or ate a steak with peas and a baked potato.
In your office stood a hat rack.
The day the war was declared
everyone in the street was wearing a hat
and they were wearing hats
when a ship loaded with men sank in the icy sea.
My father wore one to work every day
and returned home
carrying the evening paper,
the winter chill radiating from his overcoat.
But today we go bareheaded
into the winter streets,
stand hatless on frozen platforms.
Today the mailboxes on the roadside
and the spruce trees behind the house
wear cold white hats of snow.
Mice scurry from the stone walls at night
in their thin fur hats
to eat the birdseed that has spilled.
And now my father, after a life of work,
wears a hat of earth,
and on top of that,
A lighter one of cloud and sky-a hat of wind.
Grace:
Those mice of yours are in so many poems.
Billy:
Mice are uncontrollable.
Grace:
But yet yours are not, that?s the interesting thing. Mice are usually in poems because one can?t imagine what they'll do. But yours carry matches, they wear little hats 333333333¾444444444 they?re so intelligent.
Billy:
It?s actually a little circus. Instead of a flea circus, it?s mouse circus that I?m running here. My poems are infested with mice, and I don?t really know 333333333¾444444444 there could be some childhood trauma attached to this, but I don?t know why. I could put out a book of poems just called The Mouse Poems, I think.
Grace:
It is an extension of your consciousness. It is the twinkle in your eye comes out in the mouse. Which would lead us to my question about the poem you have with a mouse carrying a match.
Billy:
333333333¾444444444 that little mouse 333333333¾444444444 that dangerous little mouse.
Grace:
What is the poem's title?
Billy:
It?s based on a bit of country advice, which is not to leave matches lying around. Well, the poem kind of explains that, and I learned this lesson from a friend of mine, who does live in the country, in Vermont. The poem is called The Country.
Grace:
Billy Collins, Poet Laureate of the United States is also a visiting professor at Sarah Lawrence.
Billy:
Well, I do some of this kind of hired gunī work. I taught at Columbia for a semester last year, and in the fall I usually teach a course at Sarah Lawrence in the graduate writing program. So I do a little bit of that kind of Stranger Rides into Townī 333333333¾444444444
Grace:
Moonlighting.
Billy:
Yeah.
Grace:
Yes. And you live in Somers, New York, which is near the city.
Billy:
It?s in northern Westchester. It?s about forty miles north of New York City.
Grace:
And when were you a Literary Lion?
Billy:
That was in the nineteen ninety's.
Grace:
Early on.
Billy:
Well, it?s basically is an event to raise funds for the Library, the New York Public Library.
Grace:
It?s very nice, though, to be named a Lion, I think. When you think of those big stone ones outside of the Library.
Billy:
They have names, I forget what their names are. It?s like Patience and Prudence, or something. But yes I think 333333333¾444444444 well, once you?re a Lion, you?re always a Lion.
Grace:
Rita Dove said that that was one of the things she really was the proudest of. It meant a lot to her.
Billy:
Well, it?s a very gala occasion. It?s all black tie, and you have an escort who watches you all night and just in case you?re left alone for a moment, and not in conversation, this escort comes right over and makes small talk with you. When a real person comes and talks to you, the escort kind of goes back to leaning against the wall. And they put a medal 333333333¾444444444 the put a kind of a gold medal with a red ribbon around your neck so you look like an ambassador or something. It?s quite a grand event.
Grace:
You?re saying that with the same mix of respect, and humor 333333333¾444444444 and irony. Respect and irony go together I think. This is going to embarrass you, but that?s my job. You are the most popular poet in America. Now, you have no way of knowing that, because there is just no data that we can assemble. But everyone says that you are the most popular poet in America. I don?t know how that feels when you?re alone in your bed, but it must mean something to you.
Billy:
It's hard to calculate. The poems I write are basically for one person. I don?t know who the person is, but I have an idea of speaking or whispering these poems to one listener, and I hope I?m aiming for a very intimate connection. When this one reader somehow multiplies into thousands of book buyers, there?s a little bit of a gulf there, because I?m always speaking to the one, and then when they multiply, it?s a bit surprising to me. So, I don?t know why or how this has come about, 333333333¾444444444 I?ll be like Howard Nemerov, bring them on! I?m enjoying the ride!
Grace:
It?s lots of fun I see you have a handwritten poem on the table.
Billy:
Well, this is a little poem based on something you hear on the radio every now and then, and the title is Surprise.
Grace:
It?s scribbled. It?s a premier; I know it, because it?s not even printed yet.
Billy:
No, I haven?t typed it up yet, it?s a pretty new poem.
Grace:
When you speak with amusement, is there always a fear that people will smile at the next poem, and maybe reduce all of your poems to one idea. That?s always the danger. I haven?t seen it happen yet. I think maybe you can rise above that. We?ll see.
Billy:
It?s the big risk, actually, because humor has 333333333¾444444444 I mean things are changing these days, but humor has had a really, very bad reputation in poetry ever since the romantic poets, ever since the early 19th century, when humor was affectively driven out of poetry by the English romantic poets I would say, and it?s only now that I think that humor is finding a way back into poetry from a ghetto where it was consigned, and that ghetto is called light verse. 333333333¾444444444but is a danger that if your work provokes humor that there?s nothing to it.
Grace:
Lacks respectability.
Billy:
Indeed. I mean, we?ve gotten used to connecting poetry not only with difficulty, but also with seriousness.
Grace:
But believing that something can be seen your way, with such conviction, can make you be the Poet Laureate of the United States, because Stafford has a poem about 'what a muse is'333333333¾444444444the muse came to me and said, look at things your own way.ī And this has served you very well, and it may even change our attitude about the wisdom of humor, which had a time honored tradition. You are an expert in the Romantics. In fact, you?ve got your fudī, right? Your Ph.D. in romantic poetry?
Billy:
I do, yes. I didn?t start out being a poet. I was an academic, I got a Ph.D. in English literature and wrote a dissertation on Wordsworth and Coleridge and began teaching in Universities, and the poetry came quite late. I mean I really didn?t get my first real book published until I was well into my forties.
Grace:
Sometime, I can see the light of the romantics in your lines.
Billy:
Well, the great romantic lyric, particularly those poems of Wordsworth and Coleridge that are poems of meditation were very influential. They?re poems that begin with the speaker situated somewhere. There?s always a sense of location, and it?s usually, of course, in a landscape. My poems tend to be located in places too.
Grace:
In a hammock.
Billy:
Yeah, it could be in a hammock, in the kitchen, or walking the dog around the lake, or something, but my feeling is that poetry is a kind of form of travel literature, and that I think we should end up at a different place at the end of the poem than the place we started. And if the poem is to transport us to another place, I feel it must start in some place. So I try to begin by orienting the reader, and you might say, toward the end of the poem, I wouldn?t mind it really if the reader experienced a certain pleasurable level of disorientation.
Grace:
That is characteristic of the romantics.
Billy:
I think so. Those poems start with a set of simple observations; the poet kind of swiveling around and recording what he is taking in. And then there is a relaxation into a chain of memories and associations, and the poem begins to lift out of its original environment into areas of the imagination, and areas of psychology.
Grace:
I have to get this in. You are such a trickster. Do you know that I?ve taught the paradelle without knowing you were kidding? And got some fabulous poems. Describe a paradelle, please. I'll tell the audience: Billy Collins did a parody on a villanelle, but in his book, he did not reveal it was a parody, he just wrote a paradelle, I think, "for Susan, and, I was teaching a workshop in Italy, and so I 333333333¾444444444 I think that?s a good thing we could do tomorrow, Everyone will write a paradelle like Billy Collins. I get home, and the Paris Review reveals that I?ve been duped. It's a joke. So tell everyone what a paradelle is, and you will be surprised to learn it works as a serious form.
Billy:
Well, I just made this up. I wanted to write an intentionally bad formal poem. I wanted to write a poem in which the poet couldn?t handle the rules of a genre, and botched it. And I thought, well, I could write a really bad sonnet, or a bad villanelle, but I figured there?s enough of those around, so I would just make up a new form, and I called it the paradelle, which is a kind of combination of a parody and villanelle, and then I made up this insane set of rules for it, and I tried to pass it off in a footnote as actually an old, fixed form from, I think, from the 11th century France. And the first rules are that the lines just repeat themselves. So that is almost, you know, kind of a numbskull sense of simplicity. But then the secondary set of rules asks you to use all only the previous words, and it?s a little hard to explain without looking at it, but it would be like having a really bad set of letters in a Scrabble game, and being asked to write the Lord?s Prayer with them.
Grace:
Well, everyone loved writing it. I know your own paradelle had kind of a funny last stanza. I thought it was a mess. But then I thought, well, you know, this might be language poetry.
Billy:
The bad poet who wrote the Paradelle can?t fit in all the words, so all these remainder words, like if and to and with, are just kind of stuffed into the last few lines of the poem.
Grace:
At the end of the page, you should say, don?t try this at homeī. So it was lots of fun. Billy Collins is our new Laureate, and we?re wearing him down, but we?re still going to get information from him. You once spoke of writing a poem from the first lines of an existing poem.
Billy:
I have a poem that takes off on another poem. It?s called Litany and I use the first two lines of another poet to begin my poem. And I found a poem by this poet, and he begins his poem by saying, You are the bread and the knife; the crystal goblet and the wine,ī and I thought I would just restart his poem and produce a different version of it, and the title of my poem is Litany. It's a takeoff on those poems where the woman is the moon and the stars, and it?s kind of a parody of that kind of poetry.
Grace:
In Litany we have a moment, a little moment of still water, with the sound of the rain and the shooting star, because, in a way, in the midst of all the kind of attention you?re getting, I mean that?s the way you must feel, really, as a poet. And that?d be great for a title of your new book, "The Bread and the Knife." What is your title going to be? I see you have almost ten pages of new work here..
Billy:
I don?t know yet. I?m playing around with a number of titles. So I don?t want to say one, but it?s 333333333¾444444444 usually I just pick a title from a poem 333333333¾444444444and paste it on the front of a book. I really don?t think of titles as having to be a key to the whole book. I really think of titles as an interesting couple of words on the cover that will encourage people to open the book.
Grace:
University of Pittsburgh has been really good to you over the years, and Random House will now pick up the banner for you. Do you have an editor?
Billy:
Well I just lost my editor at Random House.
Grace:
What is the relationship between a poet and his editor?
Billy:
We had a very friendly relationship, but I don?t really need any editing 333333333¾444444444
Grace:
He doesn?t change anything.
Billy:
No, he doesn?t. I mean I think he, perhaps made some suggestions. We did a New and Selected Poems, and he made a few suggestions about which poems he thought should be included.
Grace:
Were they good suggestions?
Billy:
Yes, they were, but I don?t need a line edit or anything. I don?t want to compare myself to Nabokov, but Nabokov wrote to his publisher at one point and he said, By editor, I assume you mean proofreader.ī
Grace:
And who could edit him anyway. Billy Collins is here, and on September eleventh, he had actually been inaugurated as Poet, although we hadn?t had all the festivities yet. And he did have a chance to make one of the first public statements, which I read in the New York Times, about the purpose of poetry in a time of tragedy. I thought it was a really important remark. Do you remember how you framed that event, and why poetry was called for? I know all of us got a lot of poetry. My email was glutted. And poetry was the preferred method of communication.
Billy:
Well, the expression people have used is that, in this time of crisis, people have turned to poetry. The cynic in me feels that those people will probably be turning back away from poetry, because poetry is either part of your daily life or it isn?t. I think people turn to poetry in order to ritualize their grief. Poetry is a stabilizing force, because it has form. It?s a way of taking grief, and turning into something sensible. Also, I think, poetry connects us to the past in very telling and dramatic ways. I think in that comment I said something that I still feel, which is that poetry is the only history of the human heart that we have. It?s a history of human emotion. I mean, it?s not a history of battles or treaties, but it?s the history of human emotion. And when we feel overwhelmed with emotion, it?s like looking at that history, and seeing that we?re not alone.
Grace:
The words to say it. If we could just put it in words, that takes care of it.
Billy:
Well, it stabilizes it to some degree.
Grace:
That?s right. Music goes through us, but poetry becomes permanent, and then we can put it aside, once we?ve jelled it, maybe, with words. I know Brodsky said that our only record of human sensibilities, from earliest time, was the poetry that was. We have no other record of human sensibilities but through the poetry.
Billy:
When you realize that the human sensibility is something that ties us all together, despite our individual eccentricities, and that, when you must take into account the sense that human beings have a thoroughly limited range of feeling -- we feel separation, we feel joy, we feel grief, but there is a limited number of things we can feel. And history has recorded the way human beings have registered those feelings for thousands of years. So, to read poetry, returns us to a community of feeling, and a history of feeling. And that, I think, acts as some consolation to our personal feelings. Because when we feel, when we are emotional, we feel alone, I think.
Billy:
I could read a little poem that I wrote very quickly, actually. Well maybe you?d be able to tell this was written quickly. I?ll let you decide that, but it?s just about something I saw on a train quite recently, and I more or less just wrote the poem as I was observing what the poem describes, and the poem is called Love.
Grace:
I have to comment on the way you love God in your poetry. I love it.
Billy:
I hope God loves it.
Grace:
It?s in a lot of your work, it?s in all the lines. I really love that. That is from your background, you?re so reverent 333333333¾444444444 in your incorrigible way.
Billy:
I?m a bad altar boy.
Grace:
There is just so much belief at stake in your work. We must talk about the lovely Diane, when we speak of love 333333333¾444444444 because, you know, literary gossip is important too. Billy Collins is married to this fantastic woman, Artemis, who is an architect? She is now about to be a furniture designer. She?s a visual artist, and she is very charismatic. But I want to say how humbling it must be to be married to someone who knows calculus, physics, and the wind stress of buildings. This puts you in your place, doesn?t it?
Billy:
She knows real things like 333333333¾444444444 she knows about concrete and I-beams..
Grace:
And does she wear a hard hat sometimes?
Billy:
She carries a hard hat around in the trunk of her car, and 333333333¾444444444and stomps around these building sites, telling contractors what to do.
Grace:
She?s a proper soulmate for you.
Billy:
Yes, I take care of the, kind of, airy stuff, and she deals with making the roof not cave in. I feel competitive with her 333333333¾444444444because I?m really driven to write poems that will last longer than her buildings. "When all your buildings fall down, people will still be reading these poems!ī Sounds like one of these Shakespeare boasts.
Grace:
Well, she?s going to be a great asset in Washington as well. You?ll have to bring her every time you come. And we?ll look for her furniture design, which is about to be launched. I think that is truly exiting. Will it have a name?
Billy:
The Billy Collins Memorial Chair. No- I?ll have to stay out of that.
Grace:
We?re at the Library of Congress, and we have time for another poem.
Billy:
Well, here?s a poem that?s called Sonnet. It?s a slightly more formal poem, and it mentions, maybe the first sonneteer, the Italian poet Petrarch, and also his, you might say girlfriend, Laura. Sonnet.
Grace:
How do you describe your education? From the beginning. Holy Cross College333333333¾444444444
Billy:
Jesuit would be, probably, the one word explanation. I went through the full metal jacketī of Catholic education.
Grace:
From kindergarten?
Billy:
Well I did lapse there. I went to a public kindergarten. And then, I don?t know why, but then from the first grade on, I was in Catholic school. And all this culminated with four years of Jesuits at Holy Cross College.
Grace:
Yes. Well the incense has left but I still get the essence of it in your writing.
Billy:
That education can certainly get an amazingly vivid set of religious images.
Grace:
and imagery!
Billy:
And you also get a taste for Latin, the sound of words without understanding what the words are, because as altar boys (now, altar people) memorize the Latin, presumably without having much of a clue of what it means. And so you memorize syllables. And you?re memorizing these sounds.
Grace:
The music.
Billy:
You?re memorizing the music of the language without understanding it, and it?s similar to the pleasure you get, you can get out of listening to a poem in a language you don?t understand.
Grace:
If our children go to Catholic school, there's no guarantee they'll be poets, is there?
Billy:
333333333¾444444444 but there are examples like Gerard Manley Hopkins. It doesn?t prevent poetry.
Grace:
Nothing prevents poetry in a room with Billy Collins. He has launched a website, which will be available in January 2002. We will hope that all of the teachers call the Library of Congress and find out more about it. The site is www.loc.gov/ poetry And that will give you the first image, and then you go to the home page, and punch that up, I guess, and just follow the directions from there.
Billy:
And what you?d be looking for is the program called Poetry 180.
Grace:
That?s the title.
Billy:
And I think if you go to the homepage, you?ll be directed to Poetry 180.
Grace:
And even if there?s a search mechanism, you may be able to write in Poetry 180. As you leave us today, what poem shall we remember?
Billy:
A poem is called Forgetfulness. Something that happens to us all.
Forgetfulness.
The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of,
as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,
something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.
Whatever it is you are struggling to remember
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.
It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.
No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.
Grace Cavalieri is a poet and a playwright. Her latest book of poetry is Water on the Sun c2006 (Bordighera Press.) The Xoregos Performing Company recently presented a staged reading of her new play Hyena in Petticoatsī at New York City Public Library. Contact information gracecav@comcast.net.
Grateful acknowledgement to Word Wrights! Magazine, 2002, and to www.cortlandreview.com whose streaming audio first featured this program
