We’re halfway through national poetry month, and I haven’t posted a single poem since the third!

To make up for it, I’m posting one of my recent favorites by a poet I just discovered (about six years after the rest of the world): Billy Collins.

For those who don’t know him, he is the largest-selling poet of all-time in the US, and served as our national poet laureate in 2001.

He starts the book, The Trouble With Poetry with the following poem: You, Reader. To me, this work speaks to everyone who’s in a creative profession — working with college-educated colleagues. What is it that makes us writers, designers, IA, usability folks any different than anyone else in marketing? I always find a new reason in these lines.

It also reminds me of one of my first creative writing professors, who felt that the difference between professional writers and amateurs is being able to notice the things that no one else notices in the ordinary of every day, and make art from it.

You, Reader

I wonder how you are going to feel
when you find out
that I wrote this instead of you,

that it was I who got up early
to sit in the kitchen
and mention with a pen

the rain-soaked windows,
the ivy wallpaper,
and the goldfish circling in its bowl.

Go ahead and turn aside,
bite your lip and tear out the page,
but, listen – it was just a matter of time

before one of us happened
to notice the unlit candles
and the clock humming on the wall.

Plus, nothing happened that morning –
a song on the radio,
a car whistling along the road outside -

and I was only thinking
about the shakers of salt and pepper
that were standing side by side on a place mat.

I wondered if they had become friends
after all these years
or if they were strangers to one another

like you and I
who manage to be known and unknown
to each other at the same time -

me at this table with a bowl of pears,
you leaning in a doorway somewhere
near some blue hydrangeas, reading this.

Related posts:

1. Kicking off Poetry Month 2009: Langston Hughes
2. Interactive advice from 1926
3. One Last Poem For Poetry Month
4. Afternoon Baseball On The Radio