The Uncarved Blog

Enjoy the poetic genius and humor of Billy Collins reading his poem “January in Paris” on Page Meets Stage, November 12, 2005. The video was posted by Taylor Mali who shared the stage with Collins. A poet and teacher, Mali curates the Page Meets Stage series, which takes place at The DL Lounge in New York City. A version of this poem was published in “Ballistics” (Random House, 2010). I read it in my copy of Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems, pages 89–91 (Random House, 2013).

January in Paris

Poems are never completed—they are only abandoned.
— Paul Valéry

That winter I had nothing to do
but tend the kettle in my shuttered room
on the top floor of a pensione near a cemetery,

but I would sometimes descend the stairs,
unlock my bicycle, and pedal along the cold city streets
often turning from a wide boulevard
down a narrow side street
bearing the name of an obscure patriot.

I followed a few private rules,
never crossing a bridge without stopping
mid-point to lean my bike on the railing
and observe the flow of the river below
as I tried to better understand the French.

In my pale coat and my Basque cap
I pedaled past the windows of a patisserie
or sat up tall in the seat, arms folded,
and clicked downhill filling my nose with winter air.

I would see beggars and street cleaners
in their bright uniforms, and sometimes
I would see the poems of Valéry,
the ones he never finished but abandoned,
wandering the streets of the city half-clothed.

Most of them needed only a final line
or two, a little verbal flourish at the end,
but whenever I approached,
they would retreat from their ashcan fires
into the shadows—thin specters of incompletion,

forsaken for so many long decades
how could they ever trust another man with a pen?

I came across the one I wanted to tell you about
sitting with a glass of rosé at a café table—
beautiful, emaciated, unfinished,
cruelly abandoned with a flick of panache

by Monsieur Paul Valéry himself,
big fish in the school of Symbolism
and for a time, president of the Committee of Arts and Letters
of the League of Nations if you please.

Never mind how I got her out of the café,
past the concierge and up the flights of stairs—
remember that Paris is the capital of public kissing.

And never mind the holding and the pressing.
It is enough to know that I moved my pen
in such a way as to bring her to completion,

a simple final stanza, which ended,
as this poem will, with the image
of a gorgeous orphan lying on a rumpled bed,
her large eyes closed,
a painting of cows in a valley over her head,

and off to the side, me in a window seat
blowing smoke from a cigarette at dawn.

© Billy Collins

I love his clever association of completing a poem to an act of lovemaking with his pen as a sexual organ. Very funny! Reminds me of a poem I wrote about The Power of The Pen.

Enjoy other poems and videos: Billy Collins humorously disagrees with Heraclitus showing how to go into the same water twice | Billy Collins suggests more creative ways to respond to poetry than analyzing it to death | Billy Collins discusses the value of getting to the end of a poem and what can happen afterwards.

The Library of Congress Web Guides: Billy Collins: Online Resources.

Tags: Billy Collins, humor, page meets stage, paul valéry, poet, taylor mali

This entry was posted on April 26, 2015 at 2:16 am and is filed under Literature, Other poems, Poetry, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.