Poetry: Mothers

A few weeks ago, I saw Kay Ryan and Billy Collins speak at the final event of this year’s Chicago Humanities Festival. They’re the current Poet Laureate and a former one. They read some poetry and bantered, and it was really, really good. The theme of this year’s CHF had something to do with humor and I was thinking that two poets wouldn’t exactly cause much knee slapping or side splitting, but it was very funny. The poems they read were almost all excellent too.

The Lanyard

Billy Collins has a great poem called The Lanyard. It’s about mothers and the debt that we each owe ours. I’d like to say something insightful about it, about mothers, but I think the poem stands up just fine on its own. I was going to post the full thing here, but I decided I don’t feel comfortable doing that, so you can find it here. If you’d like to hear and see the author read it, the Poetry Foundation has a video of Billy Collins reading The Lanyard and I highly recommend it. Actually, I beg you to watch it—please—it’ll do you good. Watch it here. Or here:

So, yeah, what he said.

Notes:

(1) Anne: The introduction to the video is by G.K. (yes, that G.K.), so you may want to start at the 20 second mark.

(2) Look at all those people listening to a poet! It warms my heart.