Margin Notes

What I was reading:

The other day, I remembered Billy Collin’s ‘Piano Lessons’, a short collection of free verse poems which could be considered one long poem. It took me a while to track them down using keywords in the search engine. Eventually, the entry “piano lessons left hand revenge” managed to fish the entire collection from the depths of the internet, writhing with the want to be read. After reading through them, I found it funny that the revenge of a pianist’s left hand was what stuck with me – the focus of mini-poem #5:

I am learning to play

“It Might As Well Be Spring”

but my left hand would rather be jingling

the change in the darkness of my pocket

or taking a nap on an armrest.

I have to drag him in to the music

like a difficult and neglected child.

This is the revenge of the one who never gets

to hold the pen or wave good-bye,

and now, who never gets to play the melody.

 

Craft Moves I Notice the Writer Making:

•  Collin sets the scene with half of a sentence (the first two lines). He is learning to play a piece on the piano – as pianists do. What edification could this bland statement possibly offer the reader? One of the important aspects of a poet’s craft is to make the mundane glorious, so the reader is left anticipating how the author will make this happen
• Collin makes interesting choices with truncation in this free verse poem. The thought on line 3 should continue instead of being cut in half to create line #4. There’s not even a coordinating conjunction to give a soft pause to justify truncation. This is an interesting creative choice contextually because “jingling” is like (unskilled) music, and we learn later that the left hand must be “dragged” to make skilled music like “a neglected child.” That the line is truncated at “jingling” brings attention to the left hand’s “song”. The last word in a line of poetry often gets more weight of meaning.
• The next seven lines offer a richly personified account of the life of the pianist’s left hand, as though it had a mind and feelings of its own. This is not meant to be a synecdoche.
• The last three lines are a counterpoint to the first line. The pianist may be learning to play “It Might As Well Be Spring,” …(lines 3-7) … But his left hand never gets to play the melody. On a side note, I listened to the song, and the left hand’s part sounds harder to play than the right hand’s part in many places.

Possibilities for Writers:

• Try personifying one of your body parts. For example, which part of your body faces neglect? Experiences injustice? Which is overworked? Which is the teacher’s pet? Does your face get tired of smiling (does it know it’s lying for you)? Do your toes feel trapped? Write about life from that part’s perspective.
• Try experimentally truncating your poetry lines, focusing on how the meaning of your sentence is altered when you let different words end a line.
• Try using ‘Piano Lessons, 6’ as a mentor text for your own free verse poem with: 1) A mundane statement, 2) An explanation for why the statement is not so mundane after all, and 3) An alternative perspective that adds to the beginning statement.