Note: this week, like most weeks, I gyaff about a poem. Hope you enjoy reading it and share it with your friends who might be interested in this kind of stuff. If they’re not interested, share anyway as there’s no pleasure more profound than seeing a friend’s disappointed face.
I recently encountered a poem by the American poet Billy Collins. His poems do not shove in your face any profound proclamations. They are humorous artefacts that merely hint at profundity. The humour makes you stay with the poems for a little longer, making it more likely for you to absorb the deeper meanings of what’s been said.
The poem I encountered did something that rarely happens. It mimicked to a tee an experience I had. Here’s the poem —
Hippos on Holiday is not really the title of a movie but if it were I would be sure to see it. I love their short legs and big heads, the whole hippo look. Hundreds of them would frolic in the mud of a wide, slow-moving river, and I would eat my popcorn in the dark of a neighbourhood theatre. When they opened their enormous mouths lined with big stubby teeth I would drink my enormous Coke. I would be both in my seat and in the water playing with the hippos which is the way it is with a truly great movie. Only a mean-spirited reviewer would ask on holiday from what? - Billy Collins
Now that I’ve re-read the poem, I realise that it doesn’t mimic my experience exactly to a tee. The setting was not a movie theatre but a zoo. The water body might not have been a slow-moving mud river but there certainly was water which looked muddy and flowed whenever the hippo moved. Out of respect for the setting, I was carrying neither Coke nor any popcorn. There weren’t hundreds of hippos, but two; of which only one was clearly visible. I certainly was both inside and outside the fence, but not a movie screen; not playing exactly but doing what the hippo was doing — floating on the water like a balloon, now and then turning around to expose its tummy to the sun, and doing that thing with its ears that comes so naturally to hippos.
I also tried to mimic the bored expression of the hippo’s face, but my excitement was bubbling out of me. My partner wanted to maximise the number of species she could see. While she went around, saw some deer, and came back disappointed, I was standing near the hippo fence waiting for its next round of turning around. It was a hot day, but I could have stood there for ages thinking wishfully to live the life that hippo was leading.
I know some of you must already be thinking that I should be grateful to be born as a human being. We are evolved enough to have left behind the basic dangers of survival and can use the very human faculty of imagination to type out crap about our own species on a device only we have the luxury of using. Here I am sitting on a comfortable couch, fantasising about giving all this up to wallow all day in muddy water. If you did not think this, you have my respect. If you did, I would call you a mean-spirited reviewer.
The world is full of mean-spirited reviewers. They try to find logical consistency in everything despite the fact that the things we enjoy the most are probably dangerous for us. Ask a glutton about sugar, a smoker about cigarettes, a drinker about alcohol. The responses you would get would put the most romantic of poets to shame.
Only a mean-spirited reviewer would say that the experience I had was very different from what’s written in the poem. In fact, the only similarity between the poem and my experience is the word ‘hippo’. Even this might not be true as hippos trapped in a zoo and hippos running around freely are two different things altogether. These mean-spirited reviewers deserve profound proclamations shoved in their faces. I am happy superimposing my experiences onto poems that have very little in common with them. I know it’s dangerous—it might as well be fatal—but that’s what I enjoy doing. If only it were still in fashion, I would have written odes to ‘wallowing in delusions triggered by poems’. For now, this essay should do.
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