Picnic, Lightning

by Billy Collins

Winner of the 1999 Paterson Poetry Prize

Over the past decade, Billy Collins has emerged as the most beloved American poet since Robert Frost, garnering critical acclaim and broad popular appeal. Annie Proulx admits, "I have never before felt possessive about a poet, but I am fiercely glad that Billy Collins is ours." John Updike proclaims his poems "consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides."

This special, limited edition celebrates Billy Collins's years as U.S. Poet Laureate. Picnic, Lightning--one of the books that helped establish and secure his reputation and popularity during the 1990s--combines humor and seriousness, wit and sublimity. His poems touch on a wide range of subjects, from jazz to death, from weather to sex, but share common ground where the mind and heart can meet. Whether reading him for the first time or the fiftieth, this collector's edition is a must-have for anyone interested in the poet the New York Times calls simply "the real thing."

Genres: Poetry, Fiction, Contemporary, American, Adult, Humor, Literature

103 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

William James Collins is an American poet who served as the Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. He was a Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York, retiring in 2016. Collins was recognized as a Literary Lion of the New York Public Library (1992) and selected as the New York State Poet for 2004 through 2006. In 2016, Collins was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. As of 2020, he is a teacher in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton.

Reviews

[Julie G · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve always loved it that Billy Collins (still with us) and Mary Oliver (no longer with us) were born only 6 years apart.

I can draw easy comparisons to their work, and I think that both of their careers have been effective in demystifying poetry and making it more approachable to all readers.

Both poets are concerned, primarily, with the “mundane,” even if Mr. Collins writes more of coffee mugs and jazz and Ms. Oliver wrote more about beavers and the music made by babbling brooks.

This particular poetry of Mr. Collins’s was published in 1998, when he was in his late 50s, and I particularly appreciated a poem called “Victoria’s Secret.” He’s older and wiser, but he’s still a straight man, so he shares his various observations, leafing through the glossy Victoria’s Secret catalog that has just arrived in the mail (reminder: this is 1998). Yes, he has flipped through a couple of the pages and they’ve given him pause, but he ends with this:

Who has the time to linger on these delicate
lures, these once unmentionable things?
Life is rushing by like a mad, swollen river.
One minute roses are opening in the garden
and the next, snow is flying past my window.
Plus the phone is ringing.
The dog is whining at the door.
Rain is beating on the roof.
And as always there is a list of things I have to do
before the night descends, black and silky,
and the dark hours begin to hurtle by,
before the little doors of the body swing shut
and I ride to sleep, my closed eyes
still burning from all of the glossy lights of day.

So much is said in this sonnet, of sorts.

Another favorite of mine is “Morning,” where he writes:

This is the best--
throwing off the light covers,
feet on the cold floor,
and buzzing around the house on espresso--

I think this is a celebration of simple pleasures and shared experiences. I enjoyed it thoroughly, and I haven’t been disappointed by a collection of his yet.

[Susan Budd · Rating 5 out of 5]

Billy Collins is like that friend who, whether you last saw him a year ago or yesterday, has a dozen stories to tell you about the minutiae of his life and you listen in awed silence wondering why your own life isn’t half so entertaining even though his is not really more entertaining than yours. He just knows how to tell a story.

Collins sees the pathos or the humor, the beauty or the oddness of something you would have barely noticed. And it is this talent, the talent in telling a story about a wet dog or a forgotten book or a Victoria’s Secret catalog, that turns the ordinary into the extraordinary and makes you put aside everything you planned for your day so that you can listen to him tell you about his.

[Stephen M]

Some Days

Some days I put the people in their places at the table,
bend their legs at the knees,
if they come with that feature,
and fix them into the tiny wooden chairs.

All afternoon they face one another,
the man in the brown suit,
the woman in the blue dress,
perfectly motionless, perfectly behaved.

But other days, I am the one
who is lifted up by the ribs,
then lowered into the dining room of a dollhouse
to sit with the others at the long table.

Very funny,
but how would you like it
if you never knew from one day to the next
if you were going to spend it

striding around like a vivid god,
your shoulders in the clouds,
or sitting down there amidst the wallpaper,
staring straight ahead with your little plastic face?

[J.j. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'll say this up front and with all due respect. If you do not care for poetry, don't review it with one star. Simply don't review it at all. I don't know the first thing about engineering; I don't take the time to read engineering books, then drone on about how dull and inexplicable their content is and pan them.

That being said - I know a lot of contemporary poets tend to rail against Collins for what I can only assume is the fact that he is popular and they are not. I find his work hit-or-miss; however, this collection on the whole is his best, in my opinion.

The best of Billy Collins is in here - tenderness, love of nature, wry observations about the past (our shared history and his own). Along with Mark Strand and a few others, Collins is (like him or not) one of the must-read poets of this generation.

[T. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here's one of my favourite poems from this collection:

Marginalia
Billy Collins

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
“Nonsense.” “Please!” “HA!!” -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote “Don’t be a ninny”
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls “Metaphor” next to a stanza of Eliot’s.
Another notes the presence of “Irony”
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
“Absolutely,” they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
“Yes.” “Bull’s-eye.” “My man!”
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written “Man vs. Nature”
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake’s furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents’ living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
“Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”

Cover art is Martin Johnson Heade's Salt Marsh Hay (1865).

/ Written 30 September 2011
I am currently house-sitting for a relative, and I have hauled a lot of my books with me (mostly for rereading). I have turned one of the rooms into a 'writing room,' and it's nice to be able to write and read in silence.

/ First read 28 August 2004.
/ Reread on 17 February 2010.
/ Reread on 3 October 2011.

[Richard Derus · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection smacked me hard in a long-gone Borders Bookstore I frequented in Austin, Texas, during the Aughties. I am, as I believe I have mentioned, quite a fan of Nabokov; and this title is a quote from the first page of Lolita, his most famous book. (Though not my pick for his best. But that's another story.)

Of course it had to come home with me! And, despite my general unfondness for poetry, I even read it after being assured it wasn't the customary disappear-up-your-own-asshole tedious adolescent guff.

It isn't. It was mostly good. The parts that I didn't like weren't self-conscious or obscurantist or flat boring. They were just...well...poetry. Why? Why do y'all commit your passing observations to some intellectually masturbatory "standard" and pretend they're more than just passing observations? Portentous musings on Death aren't unique to you, and honestly I've heard all I ever care to about Luuuuuuv requited or un- in relation to people I haven't/can't/won't me(e)t. Does it speak to me, to my experience? Howinahell should I know, all you've done is break sentences in funny places and neglect to punctuate them. Meaning gets lost when those rules are flouted.

But here we are in a world with slams and raps and all sorts. So y'all go enjoy y'all's selves and I'll read prose, being a prosaic sort.

[tee · Rating 4 out of 5]

“no dots are connected in the vast grid
of my autodidacticism.
no branch is pruned in the forest of my ignorance,
which is why i am” reading billy collins over & over :-)

unreal Way with words!! part ii stands out and is one of my most favorite collections of poems ever. so glad i ended my two month reading drought (=first terminal of med school) with this lovely book.

[H (trying to keep up with GR friends) Balikov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Billy Collins is a national treasure. He is a poet who communicates without artifice. His poems are pleasures to read.

"It was after dinner.
You were talking to me across the table
about something or other,
a greyhound you had seen that day
or a song you liked.

"and I was looking past you
over your bare shoulder at the three oranges lying
on the kitchen counter
next to the small electric bean grinder,
which was also orange,
and the orange and white cruets for vinegar and oil.

"All of which converged
into a random still life,
so fastened together by the hasp of color,
and so fixed behind the animated
foreground of your
talking and smiling,
gesturing and pouring wine,
and the camber of your shoulders

"that I could feel it being painted within me,
brushed on the wall of my skull,
while the tone of your voice
lifted and fell in its flight,
and the three oranges
remained fixed on the counter
the way stars are said
to be fixed in the universe.

"Then all the moments of the past
began to line up behind that moment
and all the moments to come
assembled in front of it in a long row,
giving me a reason to believe
that this was a moment I had rescued
from the millions that rush out of sight
into a darkness behind the eyes.

"Even after I have forgotten what year it is,
my middle name,
and the meaning of money,
I will still carry in my pocket
the small coin of that moment,
minted in the kingdom
that we pace through every day."

Collins elevates the commonplace and calls our attention to the details of life. He "rescues" these "from the millions that rush out of sight." For me, that is a very special gift.

[Annie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Billy Collins is my favorite poet. Reading his books are truly an incredible experience. He transforms simple, common occurances and images into a quiet,vivid, transcending experience. His works give you a deep appreciation for life-all you have experienced and all you have yet to. I LOVE HIS COLLECTION!

[Leigh Kramer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I did not plan it this way but it feels fitting to finish reading this collection on World Poetry Day. Collins focuses on the ordinary and the day to day with much of this collection. There’s a specificity there too, as he references travel or musicians or artwork. I particularly enjoyed the very first poem; I could have done without the one about Victoria’s Secret models. A lovely collection to spend a few days with.

CW: death of father, grief, war casualties, reference to poet who died by suicide

[S.B. Wright · Rating 4 out of 5]

Collins was U.S. Poet Laureate from 2001-2003, and still is one of America’s most loved and successful contemporary poets both in monetary and critical terms.

I am, as I have stated before, attracted to formalist poetry, to fairly distinct and repetitive rhyme and rhythm. My enjoyment of Collins then, came as a bit of a surprise.

Picnic, Lightning is a collection of everyday musings in poetic form and from what I can ascertain, this is standard for Collins’ kind of poetry. Indeed his poem In the Room of a Thousand Miles presents us with a manifesto. Though perhaps that’s too strong a word:

In the Room of a Thousand Miles

I like writing about where I am,

where I happen to be sitting,

the humidity or the clouds,

the scene outside the window—

a pink tree in bloom,

a neighbor walking his small, nervous dog.

And if I am drinking

a cup of tea at the time

or a small glass of whiskey,

I will find a line to put it on.



My wife hands these poems back to me

with a sigh.

She thinks I ought to be opening up

my aperture to let in

the wild rhododendrons of Ireland,

the sun-blanched stadiums of Rome,

that waterclock in Bruges—

the world beyond my inkwell.

…

This focus on the everyday, the mundane, the “suburban” as Collins himself calls it, has led some to view his work as a bit bland. For sure, you won’t find rage here or angst. You might find humour, wit and playfulness though and perhaps that puts people off that think poetry should be about important things (as If laughter and lightness aren’t important) or about “plumbing the depths of one’s soul”. Collins is far more contemplative.

Personally I get the same sort of feeling reading Collins that I might reading Japanese forms like Haiku and Tanka, in that they are often very particular observations of the ordinary and yet more than that as well. The diction and syntax is fairly straight forward, enhancing his general appeal and accessibility. The poems tend to seep in under your defences and a poem that first is about returning to the house for a book, walks you gently into a meditation on alternate possibilities/realities.

Readers of speculative fiction might not view the following as all that strange but if you are fairly linear in your thinking, then this poem opens up possibilities:



I Go Back to the House for a Book



I turn around on the gravel

and go back to the house for a book,

something to read at the doctor's office,

and while I am inside, running the finger

of inquisition along a shelf,



another me that did not bother

to go back to the house for a book

heads out on his own,

rolls down the driveway,

and swings left toward town,



a ghost in his ghost car,

another knot in the string of time,

a good three minutes ahead of me—

a spacing that will now continue

for the rest of my life.

…

I enjoyed Picnic, Lightning for its relatively easy “entrance exam”, almost any lover of good written words could pick Picnic, Lightning up and enjoy it. Many of the poems could have been formatted as prose, as flash fiction, but there is something to be be gained by the arrangement of line breaks, in drawing you eye and pacing your reading. Collins draws your attention to the ordinary and most of the time finds for us the extraordinary. It’s his consistency in delivering this to the reader, I suspect, that grants him success.

Death and pain are big themes in poetry but sometimes we need to be reminded of the extraordinariness of life.

[Nadine in California · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my year of actually reading poetry instead of saying I want to, and it has started out great. I always felt intimidated into thinking that poetry was 'big brain' reading that would oppress my little brain, so Billy Collins was a good choice to set me straight. The poetry of his every day life felt right, even when it didn't reflect my every day life. My favorites in this collection are "A Portrait of the Reader With a Bowl of Cereal", "Lines Lost Among the Trees", and "The Night House".

[Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some poems in this collection made me stop and think and see some ordinary things differently, which is a reason I love poetry.

[Jamie Johnson Leach · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite collection of poems so far. I may read it again right now 💜

[Hilary "Fox" · Rating 5 out of 5]

Picnic, Lightning is a collection of poetry by the two time Poet Laureate Billy Collins. This book came highly recommended to me by my dear friend Carolyn, as indeed did all of the poetry books that have lately been filling my GoodReads shelves. This one in particular she said she had a feeling I'd like, and indeed I fell for it from the first the moment she explained the title to me. How was I to know the very contents of the book would not only live up to the intrigue of the title, but in many ways surpass it?

Billy Collins has a wonderful poetic voice. His poetic power lies in the observation, which I'm fast discovering is just the sort of poetry I love. The wonder that is found in the every day, and the way the ordinary becomes extraordinary by virtue of a small shift in the way we look at things. The contents are delightful, amusing, and often just a bit surprising. They're something to be cherished, and something I'm sure I'll carry with me for some time.

I can't recommend this book of poetry enough. It's won a spot on my favorites shelf for the way it delighted me.

[AJ Nolan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Didn't mean to re-read this whole book, but picked it up to read while my niece was reading, and couldn't put it back down. There are so many favorites in this book, so many that send chills of recognition with the last line, and others that make me laugh, and even more often, the chill-sending lines, and funny lines, come right after each other. Every time I laughed, my niece asked me what was funny, and so I read her poems, and bits of poems, and sometimes she got the humor, and sometimes she didn't. And when I tucked her in and told her good night, I read her that "It is time to float on the waters of the night./Time to wrap my arms around this book,/and press it to my chest, life preserver" and that she understood. She said, in the clarity of a child's literal mind, that she didn't want to hug her book to sleep, because her stuffed animal was better for that, but she also understood and liked the idea of floating on the waters of the night with the stories from the books she read as her life preservers. A very good image indeed.

[Garrett · Rating 5 out of 5]

In my mind, if a successful poem must surprise you. And a poet can do that in a few ways:
1) Use language so original you wish you had thought of it yourself
2) Bring you to see something in a new light
3) Combine form and content in a way you never thought of before

There are more, but those are the main ones that surprise me.

Billy Collins can do this using all three of those methods. He is by far the most accessible poet I have ever seen. He has a way of helping you into a world of ordinary but beautiful things. And he's very humorous.

I'm no English Professor, but I enjoy reading poetry, and upon re-reading him, I find his poems are more complex than on the first take. And yet the whole time it's like you're chatting with him in his living room. Anyone can pick up and enjoy his poetry, they don't bite. They don't even bark. And yet his poems are deep enough for long-time poetry lovers to appreciate.

[fatma · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Portrait of the Reader with a Bowl of Cereal
Every morning I sit across from you
at the same small table,
the sun all over the breakfast things—
curve of a blue-and-white pitcher,
a dish of berries—
me in a sweatshirt or robe,
you invisible.

Most days, we are suspended
over a deep pool of silence.
I stare straight through you
or look out the window at the garden,
the powerful sky,
a cloud passing behind a tree.

There is no need to pass the toast,
the pot of jam,
or pour you a cup of tea,
and I can hide behind the paper,
rotate in its drum of calamitous news.

But some days I may notice
a little door swinging open
in the morning air,
and maybe the tea leaves
of some dream will be stuck
to the china slope of the hour—

then I will lean forward,
elbows on the table,
with something to tell you,
and you will look up, as always,
your spoon dripping milk, ready to listen.

That's all I need to say.

[Megan Baxter · Rating 4 out of 5]

I still don't know very much about poetry. I don't know where to go to find new poets. I have little sense of the time and effort it takes to craft a poem. All I do know is that ever since I was introduced to Billy Collins' poetry, I have loved it very, very much. I've written reviews for two of his books of poetry previously, and I'm not really sure what new to say, except that Picnic, Lightning (a reference to Nabokov's Lolita) is similarly marvellous.

Note: The rest of this review has been withheld due to the changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here.

In the meantime, you can read the entire review at Smorgasbook

[Joe S · Rating 1 out of 5]

Billy Collins became our poet laureate in 2001 and 2003 by copying out the least boring sections of his journal and adding line breaks between every grammatical clause, proving definitively that the American public has no ear for pleasing sounds and no eye for moderately evocative images.

[Rachel · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are some really good poems in this book, MAYBE one or two great ones… but the good stuff to filler ratio seems skewed to the negative.

[Andrew Blok · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm reading more poetry! At least slowly over the last few months. Now, I've jumped into a collection of Billy Collins' own poems, of which I own several, but haven't read through any yet. From the poems I've read (it's hard to take high school English for four years and teach it for three and not read Billy Collins), I thought Collins was interesting, clever, but basic. I feel ashamed of that now.

Reading through Picnic, Lightning, I understand that Billy Collins is a master. One of the better answers I've heard to the question "what's the point of poetry?" is "to see things in a new way." Billy Collins is a master of this. A rainy day reveals something new about the nature of loss. An empty house raises questions of the centrality of humanity to existence. A snake on the highway makes a grand point about the connectedness of everything. Billy Collins is undoubtedly clever and speaks with his tongue in his cheek a lot of the time, but he sees the world in a fresh way. He perceives the world in ways different from most. He writes it down better than most. His collection was a breath of fresh air.

If nothing else, reading this book was a reminder that thinking you know someone after reading three of their poems, you're probably wrong, to your own detriment.

[Tam G · Rating 4 out of 5]

I only expect to like one or two (or if I really like the writer 5 or 6) poems in a book of poetry. Poetry can be a very individual thing and it takes a lot of focus to really catch what a writer is trying to throw.

After the first few I thought this book would fit that pattern. I was surprised when I deeply enjoyed the next dozen, and several more after that.

Not overly long, obsessed with large words, or plumbing the depths. Often fairly simple. Neat little surprise images in almost every poem. Some humor. Usually no more than 2 pages a poem.

A homerun of a poetry book, really. A good place to give poetry a try.

[Madelyne · Rating 4 out of 5]

The clearest deciding factor for a poet, for me, is accessibility. After that it is the sense of refreshing, regardless of the subject (be it sad or happy), that envelopes me as close the book to pick it up another day. It isn't often I find a modern poet I'm so willing to immediately pick up again and again. I have more of Billy Collins collections waiting for me at home and I suppose some part of me is saying I should hold off and savor his words for another time...obviously, though, it is poetry month and I'm going to do whatever I damn well please. And it pleases me to read more of his work!

[Reed · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another great poetry collection from Billy Collins. His writing style involves accessible storytelling, typically linking two disparate domains (e.g jazz and nature), often with underlying humor. I'm a huge fan of this. My two fave standouts from this collection:

Marginalia-- the pleasures of writing and reading notes along the page margins of books
The Many Faces of Jazz-- the conversion of jazz into facial reaction. A musical/facial version of synesthesia.

[Serhiy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Believe it or not, 90's Billy Collins poems are a bit spicy. They are more complex and inquisitive than what he writes now, but they still manage to give that aha moment, a chuckle, or a sense of calm and completion about life.

[Sara Klem · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why did it take me this long to read Billy Collins? I devoured this.

[Ray Zimmerman · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fabulous book by one of America's great, living poets.

[Jake McAtee · Rating 4 out of 5]

My favorites were Japan and This Much I Do Remember (https://wordsfortheyear.com/2016/06/1...)

[The_J · Rating 5 out of 5]

More than 20 yearts after publication, Distillation of briliance from The Poet Laureate, almost shocking intensity and quality