The Brooklyn Museum

The Brooklyn Museum Of Art.

Reference: El Rio de Luz (River of Light) - Edwin Frederic Church. 

Bi    Billy Collins' The Brooklyn Museum of Art is an open verse poem that seizes the unique and sometimes humbling experience of visiting a museum and fully immersing oneself wholly in its insightful works of art. He simply writes about being in front of an American landscape painting he likes and suddenly he's INSIDE the picture!!! — Quite LITERALLY!!! — And the whole scenario seems perfectly do- able! He envisions himself writing a history of the world by bringing to mind places and its weather going all the way back to Eden (in “The History of Weather”). The experience of visiting a museum can be delicate and is just a whole new world of inanimate things coming alive in a given space. Billy Collins shows in this poem that is ours to explore through the repertoire of the words "I will" at the very beginning of each stanza. I think that this repertoire also  almost shocks the reader as it has a very determined tone to it, it almost doesn't give the reader room to fathom or collect their thoughts as they are directly being told in a definite article that he "will" do and nothing  otherwise. A signature style that Collins tends to use  is self-deprecating humor in his form of writing, this could be linked to the fact that Billy Collins is a post-colonial poet so his writing has a sense of modesty that in fact on numerous occasions reflects in his poetry; i.e.

          "...Will spot my tiny figure moving in the stillness
And cry out, pointing for the others to see,
And be thought mad and led away to a cell
Where there is no vaulting landscape to explore,..."

He    says this in a comical yet quaint way. Poignancy is a trait as Billy doesn't try to hide the obvious. he himself declares “I think there's a chattiness to my poetry. I usually begin with a thought of some kind, some notion of the past and the present. And I like to feel like I'm holding the hand of the reader in some way.” Other readers such as a black woman such as however might read his poetry as too. As Billy Collins is a post-colonial writer, I feel that his modesty comes with trying not provide the voice, rather than being there to suggest one. Take a black woman per say, such readers I imagine can sympathize with this movement as she would have been the colonized and doubly oppressed. Not only for the color of her skin but because she is a woman! This not only existed during colonization in an extreme form, it still slightly mildly exists in today's society so even a modern day reader would understand. She would have been the lowest in the hierarchy of importance and so she’d want to break free from that mentality. I can directly reference this to ‘can the sub-altern speak’ by Spivak. The subaltern's lack of access to institutionally validated language. Not everyone grows up knowing how to write and speak like a scholar, right? Then there's the European theorist's sense that he knows what the subaltern will say when she goes to speak, because “he knows what's good for her”. Sometimes, when I read the classics, I feel like their authors are saying, "Sit down, little girl, and let the big boys talk business. Moreover then end result seems to be that even when the subaltern goes to speak and develops a voice, it will lack authenticity because she/ he would have altered themselves to tell their story in language for example. This is so because they’d have broken away from the authentic ethnic/ culture to learn a new language in order to tell their story to be understood. Not all words in the ethnic language could possibly translate 100% in the new language. The story may be lost in translation therefore the subaltern would have lost her true self.

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