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8.5
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(57 votes)
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Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.
Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.
Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.
Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.
And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.
We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.
Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.
And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.
Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page
A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."
Billy Collins
| Submitted Date |
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Monday, January 13, 2003 |
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Read poems about / on: graduate, irony, metaphor, school, future, girl, sometimes, summer, beautiful, remember, nature, rain
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Comments about this poem (Marginalia
by
Billy Collins
) |
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Michael Shepherd (8/13/2009 1:56:00 PM)
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Dear Mr Collins
It was quite by chance
that I read this poem and so
I feel I should tell you the occasion.
It was when I called in to return
the Salinger – with some regret, but
it was already overdue several bucks –
and that middle-aged man with the raincoat,
always the raincoat, and the wire half-specs
who hovers vulture-like over the Returned Books trolley
before the assistant puts them back on the shelves
grabbed your book and went to his favourite seat
by the window, with it; but then after a few minutes
slammed it down on the table and
looked around the room as if he had made
the ultimate judgment which would
be talked about in the Algonquin
in hushed awe between the slightly
less famous.
and I’d just like to say I think his judgment
was on the harsh side. I hope
your memory of my egg salad stain
which you turned so nicely into a poem
doesn’t spoil our meeting some time
in the library for which I’m sure
you’re as grateful as I am.
Yrs, E.Dickinson (Miss)
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Ladidah Poipose (8/5/2005 12:40:00 PM)
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I enjoy your light hand - I see your images as lovely watercolors - a minature of the page with the note on it in soft pencil in a locket around your throat! ! ..I'm in love! !
Thank you so much!
Miss Lah di
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Michael Shepherd (3/18/2005 2:10:00 PM)
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...though I'd write it in the margin to share his triumphal ride to posterity if Our Webmaster Whom God Preserve could fix it for me - Joyous.
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