Second Session Features Seasons

In our second session January 23, poems by Linda Pastan and Billy Collins gave us a platform from which to look at the change of seasons as a very familiar poetic motif. In her carpe diem piece "Autumn," Linda Pastan claims the poet's right to reject a glum and not uncommon metaphor and insist on celebrating color.

In "Spring Cleaning" Billy Collins, in that off-hand style that combines his characteristic wit and much learning, warns us that even the coming of spring has a cost--I suspect we will remember the "thunderous sneeze."

Kathy and Martha offered very telling additional insights into the seasons and Elmer drew upon another powerful family memory.

I think I mentioned hearing Billy Collins do a reading in New Hampshire in October. He read "Table Talk," a poem we had enjoyed last spring, in which a group of erudite professors is having dinner discussing "applying the paradoxes of Zeno in the martyrdom of St. Sebastian." Collins brought down the house with the following line, "I think I''ll have the trout," reminding us again how he juxtaposes the serious and the light and lets the air out of pompousness.

Collins would warn us against this, but if you insisted on turning over the rocks of allusion, you might find a dark side to what we know about the Druids (notice in "Spring Cleaning" he uses lower case) and even in the story of Persephone.

Next week, however, I am certain that Jessica Greenbaum and Robert Pinsky would tell us their poems are not about basketball and baseball.