A few years ago when I taught in The Netherlands, a metaphorical distinction between my students at home and my Dutch students took form in my mind. If my American kids waved their arms and shouted at the world, my Dutch ones in their small country of small houses, cars and portions held it in the palms of their hands examining it carefully and quietly. This came to mind recently when I was reading Michael Collier’s 2012 volume of poetry entitled An Individual History. Collier’s forbearers may have been Irish, German and French, but he himself is very Dutch. He holds each of us in the palm of his hand and gently probes us, parts our petals, lifts our scales, finds things in us we didn’t know were there. And himself. Michael Collier is often the subject of his own circumspect scrutiny.
“I’m glad now I didn’t tell my mother,
after the urge to do so passed, the hundredth time
I throttled my teenage pecker and in despair,
and only half believing I had sinned, wanted to confess.”
Collier is the kid you don’t notice sitting in the corner watching, the nondescript guy across the train car, the mild mannered accountant you are surprised to learn writes poetry. In fact, lack of pretence is basic to his poetry. He is a master of detail, but his detail is taken from the most everyday corners of experience and memory: his mother’s Singer sewing machine and turquoise kitchen, his father’s arthritic knee, a swimming pool vacuum cleaner, a bad dentist, televisions, Nash Ramblers and dogs:
“shoe chewers, sock swallowers, book gnawers, food gobblers;
haters of sirens;
noble, conscionable, unconscionable;
shit eaters, butt sniffers, crotch probers, ass and ball lickers, tail chasers;
farters, deep dreamers, barkers, howlers, whiners, criers, piddlers, shitters”
At the funeral of a young classmate, Collier’s son apprehends the impersonality of the world in the fact that the undertaker has parted the boy’s hair differently than he did: “Why did they do that to Brendan’s hair?”
In “Grandmother with Mink Stole, Sky Harbor Airport, Phoenix, Arizona, 1959,” he writes:
“She who wore the pelt, the helmet of blue hair
and came to us mint and camphor-scented, more strange
than her unvisited world of trees and seasons,
offering us two mouths, two sets of lips, two expressions:
the large, averted one we were meant to kiss and the other
small, pleading, that if we had the choice, we might choose.”
As you might suspect and in fact can see, Collier is not at all afraid to be accessible. This lack of fear we might expect from a twenty year old kid who came east from Arizona looking for poets because he wanted to be one. He found William Meredith who became his mentor. So cocksure was Collier of his calling that one wonders if Meredith had any choice in the matter. It is with equal confidence that Collier asserts that in painting he prefers still lifes to abstracts, and with which he addresses his readers, including the several generations of whom have learned to hate modern poetry because it makes them feel stupid:
“The boy with barbed-wire tattoos braiding his biceps
won’t listen to what his classmates say
about Yeats and ‘The Wild Swans at Coole,’
and when I try to mediate, he interrupts me,
not with words but with his lunging head,
half shaven, half in dreads,
the face unequivocal with rage,
and then the mouth’s abhorrence,
lips pressing like a strangler’s thumbs
choking the words he’d rather kill than say,
‘Swans, fucking swans,’ as if he knows precisely
what they are: sleek, vicious stand-ins
for the sad, divorced, abandoned
heart’s longed-for wrong.”
Wow!
Collier’s choice of and attention to detail is like Vermeer’s; it makes the ordinary remarkable. Take his poem “The Oracle.”
“Choke off the wineskin’s spout is what Appollo’s oracle
tells Aegeus, king of Athens, when he goes looking
to cure his infertility, which was not the same advice
my neighbor Alice O’Neill offered me
as I sat in her living room, watching her nurse her son,
who was nearly three, pushing the boy head
against her breasts that were flattened, come to think of it,
like wineskins. His knees pedaled her thighs
as he sucked and foraged, and an eye oculated the room
like the ego’s manic periscope marking what was his from hers
and scrutinizing me as if I were foreign matter,
social debris navigated with cries and squirms,
while the TV shed its blare of light and sound.
And then like the casual, misdirected oracle I deserved,
she asked if I wore briefs or boxers
and before I could answer, she said, ‘Boxers,
that’ll keep them loose and cool.’
And that was all she said, all she needed to say,
as she shifted her angel child to her other breast
when he began to fuss.”
Wow again.
Michael Collier is the author of six volumes of poetry and one of essays on poetry and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He teaches at the University of Maryland and is the past poet laureate of that state. He is also director of The Breadloaf Writers Conference at Middlebury College
But I prefer to think of him a middle class kid from Phoenix who entertained himself on sweltering hot summer days lying on his stomach reading books and falling in love with literature.