Marginalia by Billy Collins (1998)

I have shared this poem more than any other, particularly with students and academics. You see, when not reading on an e-reader, I’m rarely without a pencil in my hand—I love me some writin’ in books! There is just something so satisfying about interacting with the author who is there but at the same time not.

Part of what’s appealing to me about this poem is probably plain old narcissism. I have made those exact same notes, had similar skirmishes with authors, dutifully labeled rhetorical devices. To see all types of my reactions acknowledged by a poet is a delight. This poem makes me laugh out loud, literally, not just the ‘lol’ that you text to someone who will never be able to verify if you’re laughing or not.

Ultimately, though, it’s a love poem, and moreover, it’s a love poem that positions literature as the match-maker. We love the writers alluded to in the lines, we love the hypothetical marginalia-maker (who is us, all of us), we love Billy Collins for making us laugh and for writing such beautiful words, and we love how the narrator falls for the character at the end who has fallen for a character in a book. (Or maybe she is in love with a real person?) I love this poem because it is written in simple language and is fun to read, but at the same time it nods to the deep connection between the artist and the reader.

Short Stuff:

• Billy Collins is funny while also being poignant, and you should read a lot more of his work.
• He is included in the “Favorite 100 TED Speakers of All Time” after his TED talk, Everyday moments, caught in time. (In it, he claims that Bugs Bunny is his muse.) If you have a spare fifteen minutes, his talk is an excellent way to spend them.

Topics

joy; knowledge; necessity of art; love

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Marginalia

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
who 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 singing 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