Dear Reader

Posted by DJL on Oct 19, 2013 in Poetry | 3 comments

I am regularly amazed at how unrelentingly and completely relational identity is. I noticed this when my children were old enough to start figuring out who was who in our family. They would say things like, “So Aunt Nancy is Mommy’s sister and Uncle Jim is Daddy’s brother. Grammy is Mommy’s mommy, and Grandma is Daddy’s mommy.” The figured out who each person was, in other words, by fitting them into the web of relationships that is our family and that they were beginning to understand.

Since then, I’ve realized that this isn’t just true of our familial identity but in terms of all of our identity. In my case, for instance, it’s hard to be a dad without kids, a husband without a wife, a teacher without students, and so on. The person we believe ourselves to be emerges from the nexus of all our various relationships.

In his poem “Dear Reader,” Billy Collins gets at this reality in describing the relationship between a poet and his reader. Writers of any stripe, of course, typically crave to be read. Astute writers recognize their dependence on readers and thereby intentionally value them. It’s ultimately the poet and the reader together that make a poem. Not one; not the other; but both.

Which is why I find Collins’ poem rather touching. He knows that he needs a reader to complete him and his craft. More than that, he knows that these relationships are often anonymous. Perhaps his reader is someone who stood with him at the post office that morning or took his order at the seafood store. Maybe it’s even a driver who flashes by in a car, turning around the corner before he can get a very good look.

So, I suspect, is also true of us. We don’t always have the opportunity to know all of those who also contribute to who we are. Members of our corporation or church we barely know. Customers on whom our business depends. Other students with whom we’ve never become close but have always been part of our class. Neighbors we know…but don’t know well. We, too, are dependent on innumerable people, even when we don’t realize it.

Which lends, I think, a certain sanctity to all the people with whom we come into contact, those we know well and those we don’t. Familiar faces and strangers alike are linked to us in a never-ending web of holy relationships. And as we realize that, and as we treat all those poeple with honor and respect, we begin to live into the kingdom of God Jesus’ proclaimed. Perhaps that’s what the author of Hebrews meant by writing, “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it” (13:2).

Dear Reader

Baudelaire considers you his brother,
and Fielding calls out to you every few paragraphs
as if to make sure you have not closed the book,
and now I am summoning you up again,
attentive ghost, dark silent figure standing
in the doorway of these words.

Pope welcomes you into the glow of his study,
takes down a leather-bound Ovid to show you.
Tennyson lifts the latch to a moated garden,
and with Yeats you lean against a broken pear tree,
the day hooded by low clouds.

But now you are here with me,
composed in the open field of this page,
no room or manicured garden to enclose us,
no Zeitgeist marching in the background,
no heavy ethos thrown over us like a cloak.

Instead, our meeting is so brief and accidental,
unnoticed by the monocled eye of History,
you could be the man I held the door for
this morning at the bank or post office
or the one who wrapped my speckled fish.
You could be someone I passed on the street
or the face behind the wheel of an oncoming car.

The sunlight flashes off your windshield,
and when I look up into the small, posted mirror,
I watch you diminish—my echo, my twin—
and vanish around a curve in this whip
of a road we can’t help traveling together.

Billy Collins

Note: If you are interested in listening to Billy Collins talk about this poem and then read it, you can find the 25 minute podcast from the Key West Literary Seminar here.