The Effort
by Billy Collins

Would anyone care to join me
in flicking a few pebbles in the direction
of teachers who are fond of asking the question:
"What is the poet trying to say?"

as if Thomas Hardy and Emily Dickinson
had struggled but ultimately failed in their efforts—
inarticulate wretches that they were,
biting their pens and staring out the window for a clue.

Yes, it seems that Whitman, Amy Lowell
and the rest could only try and fail
but we in Mrs. Parker's third-period English class
here at Springfield High will succeed

with the help of these study questions
in saying what the poor poet could not,
and we will get all this done before
that orgy of egg salad and tuna fish known as lunch.

Tonight, however, I am the one trying
to say what it is this absence means,
the two of us sleeping and waking under different roofs.
The image of this vase of cut flowers,

not from our garden, is no help.
And the same goes for the single plate,
the solitary lamp, and the weather that presses its face
against these new windows--the drizzle and the
morning frost.

So I will leave it up to Mrs. Parker,
who is tapping a piece of chalk against the blackboard,
and her students—a few with their hands up,
others slouching with their caps on backwards—

to figure out what it is I am trying to say
about this place where I find myself
and to do it before the noon bell rings
and that whirlwind of meatloaf is unleashed.


Billy Collins, "The Effort" from Ballistics. © Random House 2008 reprinted with permission from the Chris Calhoun Agency. (buy now)

On this date in 1840 the first official adhesive postage stamp was issued in Great Britain. Up until the late 1830s the recipient of the letter was supposed to pay upon delivery. Rates were inconsistent: postage was calculated based on number of sheets of paper and the distance from sender to recipient. The rules were complicated and postage was expensive and people often refused to pay, costing the government a lot of money. A schoolmaster named Rowland Hill developed a new system that established uniform postal rates based on weight. The sender would pay with stamps that cost a penny each. The design of the first stamp was an engraved profile of Queen Victoria on a black background, called the Penny Black. Since Britain was the first country to use prepaid postage stamps, they have never printed the name of their country on their stamps, just a portrait of the reigning monarch.

Today is the birthday of Joseph Addison (books by this author), born in Wiltshire, England (1672). Along with his friend Richard Steele, Addison was an essayist for The Tatler, a newspaper that covered London's political and social elite. When The Tatler ceased production in 1711 Steele and Addison formed The Spectator with the intent to "enliven Morality with Wit, and to temper Wit with Morality." The Spectator offered a single, long essay every day but Sunday on subjects ranging from fashion to literary criticism. It was narrated by the fictitious Mr. Spectator whose "Spectator's Club" included a cast of characters to entertain, comment on affairs of the day, and teach moral lessons. One of the paper's biggest fans was Benjamin Franklin who admitted in his autobiography that he had modeled his prose after Addison's essays.

On this date in 1707 the Acts of Union joined the Kingdoms of England and Scotland into the Kingdom of Great Britain. They had shared a single monarch for a hundred years since Queen Elizabeth I died childless, and James VI of Scotland became James I of England. The Acts of Union combined their two parliaments into one. Many Scots were unhappy with the union, but as historian Simon Schama said, "What began as a hostile merger, would end in a full partnership in the most powerful going concern in the world ... it was one of the most astonishing transformations in European history."

It's the birthday of Bobbie Ann Mason (books by this author), born in Mayfield, Kentucky (1940) and raised on a dairy farm. She wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on Nabokov and then set out to write something completely different. She said:

"Since Huckleberry Finn, or thereabouts, it seemed that all American literature was about the alienated hero... I was sick of reading about the alienated hero. I think where I wind up now is writing about people who are trying to get into the mainstream, or they're in the mainstream, just trying to live their lives the best they can. Because the mainstream itself is the arena of action."

She wrote about rural and small-town people in Kentucky in her first collection of stories (Shiloh and Other Stories) in 1982 and her first novel, In Country (1986). Her most recent novel, Dear Ann, was published in 2020.

It's the birthday of Terry Southern (books by this author), born in Alvarado, Texas (1924) author of the novel The Magic Christian, which inspired director Stanley Kubrick to hire him to co-write the screenplay Doctor Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). Southern also wrote the screenplay for the movie Easy Rider (1969).

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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