Budapest by Billy Collins

Billy Collins, former US Poet Laureate and one of America's best-selling poets, reads his poem "Budapest" with animation by Julian Grey of Headgear.



Budapest
by Billy Collins

My pen moves along the page like the snout of a strange animal, shaped like a human arm and dressed in the sleeve of a loose green sweater. I watch it sniffing the paper ceaselessly, intent as any forager that has nothing on its mind but the grubs and insects that will allow it to live another day. It wants only to be here tomorrow, dressed perhaps in a sleeve of a plaid shirt, nose pressed against the page, writing a few more dutiful lines while I gaze out the window and imagine Budapest, or some other city where I have never been.

I hadn´t planned on posting this. Somehow I must have published the draft accidently. This is going to be the last poem by Billy Collins. I guess I have to take care that this blog does´t drift off too far into the literature field.

The Dead by Billy Collins

"As I'm writing, I'm always reader conscious. I have one reader in mind, someone who is in the room with me, and who I'm talking to, and I want to make sure I don't talk too fast, or too glibly. Usually I try to create a hospitable tone at the beginning of a poem. Stepping from the title to the first lines is like stepping into a canoe. A lot of things can go wrong." (1999, Billy Collins)

Billy Collins is the former US Poet Laureate and one of the America’s best selling (action) poets.
Though I think his website is pretty cool, there is something about his reading which I do not like at all. I´m very sensitive when it comes to voices. A great voice can read anything but then I always have difficulties following the words. I can only hear the voice and the emotions. And if a voice or the reading isn´t that good I don´t want to listen to the poem either.

Here he reads his poem “The Dead” with an animation by Juan Delcan of Spontaneous.



The Dead

The dead are always looking down on us,
they say,
while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,
they are looking down through the glass-bottom boats,
of heaven as they row themselves slowly through eternity.
They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,
And when we lie down in a field or on a couch,
Drugged perhaps by the hum of a warm afternoon,
They think we are looking back at them,
which makes them lift their oars and fall silent and wait,
like parents,
for us to close our eyes