Class Picture
April 1, 2008
Oh, today I mourn the last day of teaching poetry! Alas!
We’re heading into fiction after today. Last week I shared this Billy Collins poem with
the class. Billy Collins. Sigh. I still have a man-crush on him (does that make me gay?).
If you’ve read his poems you’ll know why.
Class Picture, 1954
Billy Collins
I am the third one
from the left in the third row.
The girl I have been in love with
since the 5th grade is just behind me
to the right, the one with the bangs.
The boy who pushed me down
in the playground
is the last one on the left in the top row.
And my friend Paul is the second one
in the second row, the one
with his collar sticking out, next to the teacher.
But that’s not all—
if you look carefully you can see
our house in the background
with its porch and its brick chimney
and up in the clouds
you can see the faces of my parents,
and over there, off to the side,
Superman is balancing
a green car over his head with one hand.
** from The Trouble With Poetry– and other poems, Billy Collins, 2005
***By the way, can anyone decipher that last stanza for me? What do you think it means?
Here’s my class picture–from 1974.
Can you pick me out of the bunch?
(there’s a little arrow beneath me in case you can’t; click pic to see a larger version).
Posted in 
April 1st, 2008 at 9:05 am
Superman’s debut Action Comics cover (1938) showed Superman holding a green car over his head.
April 1st, 2008 at 11:14 am
Hmmm, interesting.
But this poem is called Class Picture, 1954…
I wonder what is the significance of the two dates???
Inquiring minds want to know!
April 4th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
Awww, what a cutie!
April 6th, 2008 at 9:55 am
1. 1974 is my favorite year. That’s when I was born. . . I thought we were the same age?
2. I think that last stanza really sets up the “normality” of the speaker. Here he is, in his “normal” school, with his “normal” crush, his “normal” family in the distance of this mid-western “normal” memory . . . there is also the memory of a childhood fantasy, what is it we’d dream of being. Some childhood promise of a future that’s ridiculous and mindblowing too. If we think of the poet/speaker looking back on the photograph, we’re faced with the question of the real life. Who did he end up marrying, if anyone at all? What happened that his parents (who as children we believe are immortal) are now among the clouds? So that the fantasy of being young, impenetrable, full of possibility and power, is now replaced by the adult realization that our childhood is also a kind of fantasy. The distance between the child and the man, the boy who believes in Superman and the adult who has lost his parents, and school-girl crushes, and friends, is balanced in the poem on that end-dash: the rude interjection of adulthood on the fantastical life of ourselves as a child.
anyway, that’s what I think
love you!
April 6th, 2008 at 8:55 pm
Miguel,
you’re awesome. thank you so much for your feedback on the poem. it makes sense. can you be there to help me understand all poems?