Forgetfulness by Billy Collins

A big favorite of mine that a member of my book club brought to our attention. I love to read it aloud when people say they don’t like poetry. They can’t help but laugh and enjoy it. I heard Billy Collins once say, “I like to play with the reader, to be a kind unreliable narrator.” For sure.

Scroll to the bottom to hear Billy Collins reading “Forgetfulness” aloud himself.

Forgetfulness

by Billy Collins

The name of the author is the first to go

followed obediently by the title, the plot,

the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel

which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor

decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,

to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine muses goodbye

and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,

and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,

the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,

it is not poised on the tip of your tongue

or even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river

whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall

well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those

who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night

to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.

No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted

out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

Billy Collins reading the poem

Billy Collins, “Forgetfulness” from Questions About Angels. Copyright © 1999 by Billy Collins. Reprinted with the permission of University of Pittsburgh Press.

Source: Questions About Angels (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999)

From a webinar being interviewed by Nick Laird, April 8, 2021

Early influence - John Donne, “The Flea” - one of the few poems where the mistress/the one being seducted gets a voice. First poem that made me jealous. I read it out loud to some classmates in college. How did he put sex and comedy together? He felt like if he had written that poem he would feel so much better about himself. It’s jealousy, a productive energy, where you want to write like someone else. Donne’s language is so smart and his ability to swing from religious to seductive, and even together. Also he uses science for metaphors. Poets are trying to find fresh metaphors.

”Finding your voice” is an external source. You find it in other writings, by imitating others.

How he starts a poem. Sometimes an experience. The first line tells so much. The opening lines has demands. Tells students to think about the indifference of the reader — they come to poems because they love poetry, not because they’re so interested in you. So you need to pretend you love poetry more than yourself. I usually write the first line first, and write chronologically.

Heaney said after he wrote “Digging” he became convinced no one could have written that poem but him. That’s finding your voice, writing in a way that no one else can. He has a poem called “Questions About Angels” and that was the time, when he was around 30, that he felt he found his voice. Part of the reason it took that long is because he suppressed his humor, thought there was no place for it.

About this poem, “Forgetfulness,” he said it is like an essay — having a topic and writing about it.