The Sandhill Cranes of Nebraska

Poetry by Billy Collins, US Poet Laureate 2001-03. 

Too bad you weren’t here six months ago,
was a lament I heard on my visit to Nebraska.
You could have seen the astonishing spectacle
of the sandhill cranes, thousands of them
feeding and even dancing on the shores of the Platte River.

There was no point in pointing out
the impossibility of my being there then
because I happened to be somewhere else,
so I nodded and put on a look of mild disappointment
if only to be part of the commiseration.

It was the same look I remember wearing
about six months ago in Georgia
when I was told that I had just missed
the spectacular annual outburst of azaleas,
brilliant against the green backdrop of spring

and the same in Vermont six months before that
when I arrived shortly after
the magnificent foliage had gloriously peaked,
Mother Nature, as she is called,
having touched the hills with her many-colored brush,

a phenomenon that occurs, like the others,
around the same time every year when I am apparently off
in another state, stuck in a motel lobby
with the local paper and a styrofoam cup of coffee,
busily missing God knows what.

____________________

from a short essay by Brett Foster dated 18 Nov 2011, retrieved from https://www.cpjustice.org/public/capital_commentary/article/661 

I like Billy Collins as much as anyone. I share his poems with my students, and I appreciate his amiable ambassadorship on behalf of a marginal art—he makes contemporary poetry suddenly enjoyable for many people who just beforehand were strongly convinced it wasn’t. All that said, this poem, “The Sandhill Cranes of Nebraska,” strikes me as small and problematic when read in a broader context. Collins’ speaker, touring from state to state and motel lobby to lobby, seems almost embarrassingly remote from the social concerns of today. The speaker, insulated from real life, risks “busily missing God knows what” not only literally but also on a symbolic level. Why do so many poets and poems often seem clueless about the embattled world around them?

But Collins, one might object, is a modern-day Renaissance wit, a persona-maker sensitive to sprezzatura, a kind of artful nonchalance. He does what poets have done for centuries: regard universal human experience through the lens of the personal and individual. One of the most dominant poetry movements of the last century was the Confessional School, and poets remain as prone today to use “I” and “I” and “I” like an automatic stapler of self-absorption. Poets, the proverb goes, will obsess on a bougainvillea as the world burns around them. There are understandable reasons for this. The lyric mode, first of all, invites dramatizations of the self, and most poets, hungering for genuine expression, quite rightly steer clear of the season’s “hot-button” banners or the hot-winded cant of our politicians.

Moreover, with so many American poets, the fact of their employment in multitudinous creative writing programs contributes to this impression of social or economic separation. Doubtless, the securities of tenure have ensured that many of us writers have not felt the direct, most brutal effects of the economic downturn. In other words, Collins’ lecture-tour, missed-it-all poem may be closer to reality than to cluelessness. It is the rare poetry volume indeed that acknowledges the existence of 2008’s financial collapse or a recession’s economic distress—see The Situation by Ian Harrow, or Leontia Flynn’s Profit and Loss. It may be coincidental, or not, that the first two poetry collections that come to mind are British, and both authors avoid becoming “single-topic” voices.

American poets often seem more extreme in either direction: there are the activist poets, and then there are the rest of us. We may read the New York Times and shake our heads, but instead of going much beyond that, we usually do what we’re good at, and what we enjoy—we keep reading.