re: billy collins’ “the monet condundrum”
I saw this little poem “The Monet Conundrum” by Billy Collins in the 2024 Best American Poetry anthology, and what I liked about it—alongside its simultaneous simplicity and complexity—is the question it asks. The speaker wants to know if every poem he writes is different from each other, or if they’re all the same poem, just expressed in different ways. I find this poignant because I wonder the same thing sometimes about the work I’ve written—the themes that come up again and again in my fiction, in my poetry, in my essays.
When I lived in Iowa, at this super great festival called Mission Creek, I went to a workshop on obsessions. The presenter asked us what our obsessions were. I’d always thought of obsessions as something that you can’t get over, something that you need to move on from, but she explained it as something that you’re drawn to over and over, something that—as Billy Collins asks in this poem—makes you wonder if you are in fact creating different pieces each time you sit down to write or if you’re creating the same piece again and again: “haystack after haystack / at different times of day, / different shadows and shades of hay?”
I wonder about my obsessions. I used to be weirdly obsessed with absent fathers until I had a therapist who told me that I’d grow out of it eventually. I didn’t believe her, and then, eventually, I did grow out of it, and I wonder how she knew. I’ve been obsessed with the tension between what we think and what we say, wrote character after character who was afraid to say what she was thinking, no matter how disastrous the consequences would be of not getting her truth out there. I’m still obsessed with characters like that, but lately, I’ve been more drawn to people who are bold. I recently wrote a story about a woman who thinks the Poodle sitting in the bed of a pick-up truck is her Poodle, kidnapped from her home. It looks exactly like her own dog, and she makes a fuss about it— my earlier characters would never—because it was important to her to have her own back. I am obsessed, lately, with people who have their own back, people who know what they believe and who don’t stuff it down, but say it, even if the world is looking at them like they are indeed nuts.
In “The Monet Conundrum,” the speaker wants to know, “Is every one of these poems / different from the others.” He asks himself this, “as the rain quieted down,” and lately, there doesn’t seem to be a quiet moment in the world for this kind of reflection, but here, as I write this, it has been raining, and it is now quiet, and while I’ve had different obsessions, and while I’ve wondered about them, about what it is I’m making with all of these words, if it is indeed “haystack after haystack,” something that has always called me back is Black culture, and Black people, and how we might continue to energize and love each other in a world that is more and more insistent about making sure we don’t have what we need. How do you make art in that place? How do you wonder about it when you can be punished for wondering, for asking yourself “as the rain quieted down,” what it is you’re doing exactly? But when has it not been a hard time for Black people politically, and how gorgeous the art has been in response to that, how beautiful the people.
