Billy Collins has been on my mind recently, and here he is on the SAL lineup– a rockstar series if you are going to be in the Northwest this fall. That sent me back to my copy of Picnic, Lightening and “Japan”– a poem in page 51 that rings a low-voiced bell through its stanzas. Here’s a shard:
and everytime I say it, I feel the excruciating
pressure of the moth
on the surface of the iron bell.
Given that ‘excruciating’ has a frustrating, onomatopoeic appeal and that ‘pressure’ and ‘surface’ both hiss with “the general kinds of “release” with which the reader’s muscles and nervous system are familiar” (Fussel, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, 121), the sounds in this stanza (and throughout the poem) suggest to me not only the ringing of the bell but also “coitus– the physical act of love” (The Big Lebowski). Later in the poem the moth becomes “a hinge in the air above our beds”– the sound of a creaking hinge interchangeable with the (assumed) sound of box springs creaking to the rhythm of “the tongue of the bell, ringing you.”
This is a poem about his favorite haiku, which goes unnamed and under-alluded. It must be a powerhouse of sound sensation:
It feels like eating
the same small, perfect grape
again and again.
What poems do you want to listen to over and over again?
Bonus: Pinsky reciting “Samurai Song” on an elevator.
