PURITY by Billy Collins
My favourite time to write is in the late afternoon, weekdays, particularly Wednesdays. This is how I go about it: I take a fresh pot of tea into my study and close the door. Then I remove my clothes and leave them in a pile as if I had melted to death and my legacy consisted of only a white shirt, a pair of pants and a pot of cold tea.
Then I remove my flesh and hang it over a chair.
Finally I remove each of my organs and arrange them
Now I sit down at the desk, ready to begin.
I should mention that sometimes I leave my penis on.
In this condition I write extraordinary love poems,
I am concentration itself: I exist in a universe
After a spell of this I remove my penis too.
Afterward, I reward myself by going for a drive at sunset.
You can't help feeling Collins is responding to someone who's asked him: But how do you write, and when, and where? The tone is gently sarcastic, but never hurtful; there is truth in it, and nonsense; there is also the impossibility of pinning down what the art of writing really is. And there is the wild piece of humour in the middle about Collins' inability to resist leaving his penis on... If there was an immature question behind this poem, Collins has nevertheless managed to give us something valuable in return. |