Forgetfulness

“Forgetfulness” is a 23-line, eight-stanza free verse poem by former Poet Laureate of the United States, Billy Collins. Originally published in the January 1990 edition of Poetry magazine, the poem later appeared in his fourth collection, Questions About Angels, in 1991. With its long, meandering sentences that spill across lines and stanzas, the poem explores ideas of aging and memory, moving from seemingly small, less important details—like the capital of Paraguay—to larger concerns of love and loss, aging and dying.

Throughout the poem, Collins marries his characteristic wit with insight and longing. Over the course of his career, Collins established himself as a poet of the people and as a particularly American voice, examining everyday human themes with humor and poignancy. “Forgetfulness” proves an early example of this spirit, moving deftly between a lighthearted catalog of forgotten items, and more integral things that represent art, connection, and family.

Poet Biography

Born in 1941 New York, the only child of a mother who loved to recite poetry to her young son, and a father who occasionally brought home copies of Poetry magazine, Billy Collins developed an appreciation for language at a young age and wrote his first poem at age 10. He was drawn to writers like Karl Shapiro and Howard Nemerov and was influenced by Beat poets like Allen Ginsberg in the 1950s. In interviews, Collins also regularly cited modernist Wallace Stevens as an early obsession and influence.

Collins attended Catholic schools throughout his youth, then matriculated at the College of the Holy Cross in 1963 and went on to study Romantic poetry at the University of California, Riverside, earning his doctorate.

As his writing style developed over the years, Collins began to move towards the writing that would later make him famous, advocating for accessibility and clarity in poetry and criticizing poems that were difficult in ways he thought unwarranted. In an interview with Guernica, Collins said that his shift towards stylistic candidness happened “when I began to dare to be clear, because I think clarity is the real risk in poetry because you are exposed. You're out in the open field. You're actually saying things that are comprehensible, and it's easy to criticize something you can understand” (Whitney, Joel. “A Brisk Walk: Billy Collins in Conversation.” Poets.org, Academy of American Poets).

Collins joined the faculty of Lehman College in the Bronx in 1968. He published poems and collections in the following decades, earning fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the arts in the 80s. With his fourth book, Questions About Angels, Collins began to garner wider attention and acclaim, earning the National Poetry Series prize. From there, he continued to earn awards and fellowships: the New York Public Library “Literary Lion” in 1992, a Guggenheim fellowship in 1993, “Poet of the Year” from Poetry magazine in 1994, and more. From 2001-2003, he was the United States Poet Laureate and continued to earn awards like the Mark Twain Award for Humor in Poetry, the Norman Mailer Prize, honors from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and more.

Perhaps Collins’s most consequential accomplishment is his wide-spread appeal and his enormous publication success. In 1999, New York Times columnist Bruce Weber claimed that Collins was “The most popular poet in America” (Weber, Bruce. “On Literary Bridge, Poet Hits a Roadblock.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 19 Dec. 1999). Collections like Sailing Alone Around the Room in 2001 earned Collins unprecedented advances and went through multiple printings, becoming a mega-seller for the genre. Collins sold out readings to packed crowds nationwide.

Later collections continued to sell well. The Poetry 180 project, which Collins began during his tenure as Poet Laureate, became a part of American high schools across the country.

Poem Text

Collins, Billy. “Forgetfulness.” 1991. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

“Forgetfulness” begins with a catalog of things that “go” (Line 1), or that are lost or forgotten. Utilizing second person, the speaker begins his list by claiming that the first thing one forgets is the name of the author, followed by the title, plot, and eventually the entire book, “which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of” (Line 4).

From here, the speaker shifts gears and becomes reflective. He uses a metaphor to describe the loss of all of these memories, comparing them to retirees who absconded to “a little fishing village where there are no phones” (Line 7).

In Stanza Three, he returns to the catalog of losses, drawing on imagery from school, as the forgotten things now begin to encompass the names of the muses, the quadratic equation, and the order of the planets. Further things slip away in the next stanza, the items becoming more disparate: “a state flower perhaps, / the address of an uncle, / the capital of Paraguay” (Lines 11-12).

The speaker then directly addresses the “you” figure (Line 13), figure, claiming that the loss is final, and there is no way to reclaim the forgotten memories: “Whatever you are struggling to remember, / it is not poised on the tip of your tongue / or even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen” (Lines 13-15). Rather, whatever it is has gone down “a dark mythological river” (Line 16) and is thus no longer available or salvageable. The “you” (Line 13) cannot even remember the name of this river. Almost imperceptibly, Line 18 shifts in narrative: “You,” and not some object, are now the one who is lost and “well on your way to oblivion” (Line 18). The speaker alludes to a larger community of people who will share this state of oblivion, people who have forgotten such basic functions as swimming and riding bikes.

In the final stanza, the speaker’s tone shifts, and he looks empathetically upon the “you” figure, writing, “No wonder you rise in the middle of the night / to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war” (Lines 20-21). The poem closes with a sentimental image: “No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted / out of a love poem that you used to know by heart” (Lines 22-23).