Billy Collins, former U.S. Poet Laureate, Comes to Vanderbilt
http://www.insidevandy.com/drupal/node/17752
By Liz Furlow
Published Sep. 14, 2011
Billy Collins, former U.S. Poet Laureate, will be in residency at Vanderbilt until Sept. 22, visiting with students, lecturing on poetry, and giving a public reading.
Collins is the author of nine books of poetry and has received multiple awards honoring his poems. He has broken sales records for poetry and was the poet laureate during the Sept. 11 attacks, when he was asked to write and recite a 9-11 theme for a joint session of Congress.
When did you decide to be a poet?
I was interested in language as an adolescent. I like what the Irish poet named Patrick Kavanagh said in answer to the same question. He said something like 'You begin by fooling around with words, and then it eventually becomes your life.' It's all about fooling around with language and being attracted to language. People who see being a poet as an artistic goal usually don't end up being very good poets. You have to have an intense interest in putting two words together and creating an almost electrical field of energy - you have to love feeling the words interact in such a dramatic way. You go from one poem to another and then they start accumulating. You get rejected by magazines, accepted by a few, then rejected more, accepted by some of the good ones, then you get a book, and a bigger book. It's not that you decide to be a poet, it's that other people decide you are a poet. And then one day you recognize that you can't think otherwise of yourself.
What role does poetry have in the lives of the contemporary American population?
The role is minor. It's not what it used to be. There are too many competing media, there's the constant lure of pop culture, and a desire for acceleration. Information is instant, if it's not instant we get frustrated. Poetry, among other things, asks you to slow down. It runs at a fairly slow gear - for at least two reasons: one is that it causes you to fall into a more meditative, thoughtful state, to stop multitasking. Buddhists would call multitasking monkey-minded, when you're thinking of so many things at once. Poetry gets the monkeys out of our head—or it just leaves one monkey. Poetry offers the opportunity for you to get mentally and emotionally focused.
There's another pragmatic way that it gets us to slow down: it comes in lines, and doesn't rush out to the other side of the page as it does with prose. At the end of each line, the reader's attention is recirculated into the body of the poem. It asks you to kind of tap the breaks and slow down a bit. That's why poetry has been sort of a marginalized art, the poor little match girl of the arts, somewhat neglected. It does get recognition, though. The fact that we have a poet laureate, and not a prose or a ballet or a trumpet-playing laureate—that means that it holds some sort of central place in our culture.
Why do you like to write?
It's self-entertaining; it puts you in contact with the language in the most intimate way, one phrase and one word at a time. We tend not to know where we're going when we start a poem, and writing the poem is a process of discovery that can be mentally rather adventuresome. I kind of trust that a poem will take me somewhere. It's exciting to be carried by the poem in some unexpected direction, to be carried to a place that can be discovered. It's a process of imaginative discovery. I'm not writing with a pen to take dictation of what i feel, but using it to find something else.
Is your work autobiographical?
Very little of it is autobiographical—in the sense that it is writing about marriage, family, brothers and sisters. It is autobiographical in that I thought of it—my self is involved in it. But I don't talk much about past experiences that happened to me. I try to present a speaker in my poems who is existing pretty much in the present. He's in the present moment, observing something and indulging in some speculations in what he's looking at. You could read all my poems and still not know too much about me.
Why do you stay away from autobiographical work?
I don't think people care about my experiences. I don't particularly care about the experiences of others, either. My readers are strangers to me. I don't choose to burden my readers or myself—I don't want to carry autobiographical baggage and unload it on the reader. I want to carry my reader on a journey. I don't want to write about some trauma that might have happened to me at 20—that's heavy material—that tends to weigh down the poem. Other people find poetry a good way to explore their past experiences and to come to terms with them. My speaker is someone eating dinner or listening to something on the radio, and his mind starts clicking over, and moving in a different direction.
Why do you value poetry that is easy to understand?
Clarity. Clarity is not only desirable, but it tends to be a risk. You find yourself exposed—people actually understand what your saying. If you obfuscate, if you write dense, incomprehensible poetry—you're safe. Those poets hide behind the camouflage of difficult poetry.
What is your favorite poem that you have written?
I don't have any favorite, but that's because I haven't written a poem in a couple of weeks. I don't have interest in my own poetry. Once it's written, I'm not into it any more. I've been deep in the poem, as deep as I can go, and once it's done I'm out of it. It's like a door closing. The last thing I'd consider doing is picking up one of my books and reading it.
In your poem "Purity," you talk about how you write naked on Wednesdays... is there any truth in those lines?
No, I don't write naked on Wednesdays. That is a completely non-autobiographical poem. It's a response to the morbid curiosity people have about how a person writes. Whenever a writer is in a Q&A—almost always from people who want to write. Do you write in the morning, with a pen, on the computer, in a special place - these questions are completely useless. I could tell people I write with a Mickey Mouse hat on and it would be useless. So this is sort of a joke poem about letting you in on the secret.
Do you have any advice for aspiring poets?
Read, read until you are blind. There seems to be a false sense in younger poets—something about inspiration, that it comes from within you, that it's connected to some truth that's inside you. Poetry is really about something outside you, about all this other poetry that's been written. You read everything in this room, you internalize these voices, choose your influences, combine them in a certain way. Your life as a poet has an external source: all the poems that have ever been written.
Introduction to Poetry
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
- Billy Collins, January 13, 2003
Dear Reader
Baudelaire considers you his brother, and Fielding calls out to you every few paragraphs as if to make sure you have not closed the book, and now I am summoning you up again, attentive ghost, dark silent figure standing in the doorway of these words.
By Liz Furlow
Published Sep. 14, 2011
Billy Collins, former U.S. Poet Laureate, will be in residency at Vanderbilt until Sept. 22, visiting with students, lecturing on poetry, and giving a public reading.Collins is the author of nine books of poetry and has received multiple awards honoring his poems. He has broken sales records for poetry and was the poet laureate during the Sept. 11 attacks, when he was asked to write and recite a 9-11 theme for a joint session of Congress.
When did you decide to be a poet?
I was interested in language as an adolescent. I like what the Irish poet named Patrick Kavanagh said in answer to the same question. He said something like 'You begin by fooling around with words, and then it eventually becomes your life.' It's all about fooling around with language and being attracted to language. People who see being a poet as an artistic goal usually don't end up being very good poets. You have to have an intense interest in putting two words together and creating an almost electrical field of energy - you have to love feeling the words interact in such a dramatic way. You go from one poem to another and then they start accumulating. You get rejected by magazines, accepted by a few, then rejected more, accepted by some of the good ones, then you get a book, and a bigger book. It's not that you decide to be a poet, it's that other people decide you are a poet. And then one day you recognize that you can't think otherwise of yourself.
What role does poetry have in the lives of the contemporary American population?
The role is minor. It's not what it used to be. There are too many competing media, there's the constant lure of pop culture, and a desire for acceleration. Information is instant, if it's not instant we get frustrated. Poetry, among other things, asks you to slow down. It runs at a fairly slow gear - for at least two reasons: one is that it causes you to fall into a more meditative, thoughtful state, to stop multitasking. Buddhists would call multitasking monkey-minded, when you're thinking of so many things at once. Poetry gets the monkeys out of our head—or it just leaves one monkey. Poetry offers the opportunity for you to get mentally and emotionally focused.
There's another pragmatic way that it gets us to slow down: it comes in lines, and doesn't rush out to the other side of the page as it does with prose. At the end of each line, the reader's attention is recirculated into the body of the poem. It asks you to kind of tap the breaks and slow down a bit. That's why poetry has been sort of a marginalized art, the poor little match girl of the arts, somewhat neglected. It does get recognition, though. The fact that we have a poet laureate, and not a prose or a ballet or a trumpet-playing laureate—that means that it holds some sort of central place in our culture.
Why do you like to write?
It's self-entertaining; it puts you in contact with the language in the most intimate way, one phrase and one word at a time. We tend not to know where we're going when we start a poem, and writing the poem is a process of discovery that can be mentally rather adventuresome. I kind of trust that a poem will take me somewhere. It's exciting to be carried by the poem in some unexpected direction, to be carried to a place that can be discovered. It's a process of imaginative discovery. I'm not writing with a pen to take dictation of what i feel, but using it to find something else.
Is your work autobiographical?
Very little of it is autobiographical—in the sense that it is writing about marriage, family, brothers and sisters. It is autobiographical in that I thought of it—my self is involved in it. But I don't talk much about past experiences that happened to me. I try to present a speaker in my poems who is existing pretty much in the present. He's in the present moment, observing something and indulging in some speculations in what he's looking at. You could read all my poems and still not know too much about me.
Why do you stay away from autobiographical work?
I don't think people care about my experiences. I don't particularly care about the experiences of others, either. My readers are strangers to me. I don't choose to burden my readers or myself—I don't want to carry autobiographical baggage and unload it on the reader. I want to carry my reader on a journey. I don't want to write about some trauma that might have happened to me at 20—that's heavy material—that tends to weigh down the poem. Other people find poetry a good way to explore their past experiences and to come to terms with them. My speaker is someone eating dinner or listening to something on the radio, and his mind starts clicking over, and moving in a different direction.
Why do you value poetry that is easy to understand?
Clarity. Clarity is not only desirable, but it tends to be a risk. You find yourself exposed—people actually understand what your saying. If you obfuscate, if you write dense, incomprehensible poetry—you're safe. Those poets hide behind the camouflage of difficult poetry.
What is your favorite poem that you have written?
I don't have any favorite, but that's because I haven't written a poem in a couple of weeks. I don't have interest in my own poetry. Once it's written, I'm not into it any more. I've been deep in the poem, as deep as I can go, and once it's done I'm out of it. It's like a door closing. The last thing I'd consider doing is picking up one of my books and reading it.
In your poem "Purity," you talk about how you write naked on Wednesdays... is there any truth in those lines?
No, I don't write naked on Wednesdays. That is a completely non-autobiographical poem. It's a response to the morbid curiosity people have about how a person writes. Whenever a writer is in a Q&A—almost always from people who want to write. Do you write in the morning, with a pen, on the computer, in a special place - these questions are completely useless. I could tell people I write with a Mickey Mouse hat on and it would be useless. So this is sort of a joke poem about letting you in on the secret.
Do you have any advice for aspiring poets?
Read, read until you are blind. There seems to be a false sense in younger poets—something about inspiration, that it comes from within you, that it's connected to some truth that's inside you. Poetry is really about something outside you, about all this other poetry that's been written. You read everything in this room, you internalize these voices, choose your influences, combine them in a certain way. Your life as a poet has an external source: all the poems that have ever been written.
**********
Introduction to Poetry
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
- Billy Collins, January 13, 2003
**********
Dear Reader
Baudelaire considers you his brother, and Fielding calls out to you every few paragraphs as if to make sure you have not closed the book, and now I am summoning you up again, attentive ghost, dark silent figure standing in the doorway of these words.
-Billy Collins, January 13, 2003
**********
BIOGRAPHY
Billy Collins, born 1941
Dubbed “the most popular poet in America” by Bruce Weber in the New York Times, Billy Collins is famous for conversational, witty poems that welcome readers with humor but often slip into quirky, tender or profound observation on the everyday, reading and writing, and poetry itself. John Updike praised Collins for writing “lovely poems...Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides.” But Collins has offered a slightly different take on his appeal, admitting that his poetry is “suburban, it’s domestic, it’s middle class, and it’s sort of unashamedly that.” Collins’s level of fame is almost unprecedented in the world of contemporary poetry: his readings regularly sell out, and he received a six-figure advance when he moved publishers in the late 1990s. He served two terms as the US Poet Laureate, from 2001-2003, was New York State Poet Laureate from 2004-2006, and is a regular guest on National Public Radio programs. Collins has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts and has taught at Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence, and Lehman College, City University of New York, where he is a Distinguished Professor. He is also Senior Distinguished Fellow of the Winter Park Institute in Florida, and a faculty member at the State University of New York-Stonybrook.Collins was born in 1941 in New York City. He earned a BA from the College of the Holy Cross, and both an MA and PhD from the University of California-Riverside. In 1975 he co-founded the Mid-Atlantic Review with Michael Shannon. Though Collins published throughout the 1980s, it was his fourth book, Questions about Angels (1991), that propelled him into the literary spotlight. The collection was selected by poet Ed Hirsch for the 1990 National Poetry Series. A Publishers Weekly critic applauded the collection’s “strange and wonderful [images]” but believed that the poems—which are often “constricted by the novelty of a unifying metaphor”—”rarely induce an emotional reaction.” In contrast, reviews of Collins’s subsequent work regularly laud his ability to connect with readers. Discussing Picnic, Lightning and its predecessor, The Art of Drowning (1995), John Taylor noted that Collins’s skillful, smooth style and inventive subject matter “helps us feel the mystery of being alive.” Taylor added: “Rarely has anyone written poems that appear so transparent on the surface yet become so ambiguous, thought-provoking, or simply wise once the reader has peered into the depths.”
Taking off ’s Clothes (2000) was the first Collins collection published outside the US. It selected work from his previous four books and was met with great acclaim in the UK. Poet and critic Michael Donaghy called Collins a “rare amalgam of accessibility and intelligence,” and AL Kennedy described the volume as containing “great verse, moving, intelligent and darkly funny.” Sailing around the Room: New and Selected Poems (2001), the US version of Collins’s selected, had a tumultuous journey to print. The story, which garnered a front-page slot in the New York Times, originally cast Collins’s first publishers, the University of Pittsburgh Press, in an unfair light, accusing them of refusing to grant rights for poems requested by Random House for inclusion in Sailing around the Room. However, it later emerged that Random House had begun to produce the book without first securing rights from Pitt Poetry Press, a highly unusual move for a major publishing house to make. Dennis Loy Johnson reported on the controversy for Salon, noting that “ultimately it was Random House, not Pitt, that chose to delay the publication of Collins’ selected volume.” The battle between Random House and the University of Pittsburgh Press was public and uncharacteristic of the sleepy world of poetry publishing. When Sailing around the Room was finally published, in 2001, it was met with enthusiastic reviews and brisk sales.
Collins’s next books Nine Horses: Poems (2002), The Trouble with Poetry (2005), Ballistics (2008) and Horoscopes for the Dead (2011) have continued his sales streak by offering more poems that mix humor with insight. Reviewing Nine Horses for the New York Times, Mary Jo Salter commented that Collins’s “originality derives, it seems, from the marriage of a loopy, occasionally surreal imagination…to an ordinary life observed in just a few ordinary words.” She added that “one appeal of the typical Collins poem is that it’s less able to help you memorize it than to help you to remember, for a little while anyway, your own life.” But Collins’s emphasis on writing—and writing “ordinary life” at that—can, for some critics, make his poetry seem pedestrian or one-note. However many readers find Collins a source of warmth, wit and surprisingly sure technique, and reviewers have consistently noted how Collins’s poems manifest a literal concern for their readers. John Deming in Cold Front Mag has discussed Collins’s concern for those reading his poems because “the transmission of poem to head takes place always elsewhere and in silence, in the mysterious space where poems live…Collins lets us access this place with alarming graciousness, and the openness of his voice probably helps account for his popularity.”
Poet Richard Howard has said of Collins: “He has a remarkably American voice…that one recognizes immediately as being of the moment and yet has real validity besides, reaching very far into what verse can do.” Collins has described himself as “reader conscious”: “I have one reader in mind, someone who is in the room with me, and who I’m talking to, and I want to make sure I don’t talk too fast, or too glibly. Usually I try to create a hospitable tone at the beginning of a poem. Stepping from the title to the first lines is like stepping into a canoe. A lot of things can go wrong.” Collins further related: “I think my work has to do with a sense that we are attempting, all the time, to create a logical, rational path through the day. To the left and right there are an amazing set of distractions that we usually can’t afford to follow. But the poet is willing to stop anywhere.”
(Updated 2010)
Career
(Updated 2010)
Career
Lehman College, City University of New York, Bronx, NY, professor of English, begining 1971. Writer-in-residence at Sarah Lawrence College; served as Literary Lion of the New York Public Library. Performs poetry readings; has appeared on National Public Radio.
Bibliography
POETRY
by TINA KELLEY
published: January 1, 2009
MAYBE January is the cruelest month. The holiday bills fester, the garden catalogs have not yet arrived with their immodest promises of spring, and escaping to warmer climes is harder now that the economy has stopped working.
 |
NATIVE Billy Collins, 67, a former national poet laureate, grew up in White Plains and lives in Somers. |
An abundance of talented poets write and live in the cities and towns outside of New York City, including the 2008 Pulitzer Prize winner, Philip Schultz, of East Hampton.
Collins is the author of six books of poetry, including Picnic, Lightning (University Pittsburgh Press, 1998), The Art of Drowning (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995) and Questions about Angels, which was selected for the prestigious National Poetry Series. A book of selected poems, Sailing Alone Around the Room, will be published this autumn by Random House. His wry, intelligent poems can be found populating the pages of most major literary magazines in the United States, such as Poetry, American Poetry Review and Paris Review. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as many other awards, he teaches English at Lehman College, City University of New York. In June 2001, Collins was named Poet Laureate of the United States. The question of influence leads into everything eventually. I could go on. But when I am asked if there is a Biggest Influence, I have gotten into the habit of just saying “Coleridge.” Why not? Most of us first encounter Coleridge through the “mystery poems,” those dream-like poems where we are taken on a journey (“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”) or we get a tour of a dream-like landscape (as in “Kubla Khan”). One reason why Coleridge was fond of the dream state was that it allowed him to focus entirely on one thing at a time. He said that in dreams he never felt as though he were thinking of one thing while looking at something else as he almost always did while conscious.
But the poems I mean are the so-called “conversation poems” of Coleridge, like “Frost at Midnight,” “The Aeolian Harp,” and—my favorite—“This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison.” These poems contain some amazing moves as his meditation shifts from the outside landscape (or room-scape) into the self, then back through memory, then off into some zones of wild speculation. The extended lyric was a perfect form to accommodate such musings. I learned from them how to write longer, more capacious poems and how to trust the movings of my own mind. Richard Hugo talks about this—about trusting your next thought simply because it is your next thought and nobody else’s. Trust the sequence. Here comes a thought. Write it down. These Coleridge poems have a very casual feel in the beginning, but they rise smoothly into the lofty. They seem to exemplify a piece of advice from Stephen Dobyns: that is, if you get the reader to accept something simple in the beginning of the poem, he will be more inclined to accept something difficult later on. I find I have little tolerance for poems that begin with some extremely complicated chord. Better to begin like “Hot Cross Buns” and end like Debussy.
Of course, at some point, you start consciously picking your influences. You read knowing that you want to be influenced. Right now, I am reading Max Jacob. He was Picasso’s roommate for a while—imagine saying, “I’d like you to meet my roommate, Pablo”—and was killed by the Nazis, or they let him die of pneumonia at a way-station. I read him with the intention of getting under his influence. Or of just stealing his moves. Translating his language into my language.
Alexandra van de Kamp: Your work also seems to have been influenced by jazz—you’ve written some of the best contemporary poetry on it. Can you talk a little about your relationship to the music?
Billy Collins: A long time ago, when I was in my early teens, my parents used to send me to Canada for part of the summer to stay with my uncle John, to work on his farm bringing in hay and such, and to mow the lawn and the like at this hotel he owned on Lake Simcoe in Ontario. One day when I was mowing the lawn, a motorboat pulled up to the dock with two couples in it. They tied up, set up a record player, poured some drinks and laid around the deck, sunbathing and listening to what turned out to be the Benny Goodman Carnegie Hall concert. That was the first time I heard jazz. Of course, I didn’t know it at the time, but this was 1954 and they were hipsters. One of the girls was beautiful, and I fell in love with her (without ever speaking) and with jazz. I decided to devote my life to becoming someone like her boyfriend. I have been listening ever since. Recently, I have been taking piano lessons, and now I can play some standards and some blues. But I cannot seem to play if anyone else is in the room.
As for the references to jazz in my work—jazz is just something that is part of the atmosphere I live in, the part I can control. I write about jazz the way I write about the weather. It is part of the background that I sometimes move to the foreground. People like to make comparisons between jazz improvisation and the improvisational quality of some contemporary poetry. That’s worth talking about—I try to write poems in one sitting to get into the mood of spontaneity—but let’s be real. The poet can go back and erase, the trumpet player on the stand in a club cannot.
Alexandra van de Kamp: How would you describe the contemporary American poetry scene to a foreigner who may not know very much about it? In your opinion, what are its limitations, its depths?
Billy Collins: The American poetry scene is very lively and has been over the last 20 years or so. Pick up any recent volume of The Best American Poetry and read the introductions and you will get a sense of how poetry activities have escalated in number. Poetry readings, once the province of a literary elite, are now ubiquitous. They occur as often as AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) meetings. The venue is the local library, not the church basement. Our instinct is to applaud this kind of increase in a cultural activity. Fine--but what is not mentioned enough is that in the case of poetry, the growing audience for it is composed almost entirely of poets. Their motives, you see, are not entirely pure. They attend a reading sometimes not so much to hear a poet as to introduce themselves to the poet and maybe slip him an envelope of poems with a letter that begins, "I know how busy you must be..." Many people in the audience of poetry readings are there so they can get up and read their own poems at the "Open Mike". They are too busy making last minute improvements to their poems to pay attention to the featured reader. In other words, the good news is that the audience for poetry has grown exponentially and poetry has become a more noticed and respected activity in American life. The bad news is that it is a closed circuit. The audience for poetry is other poets. It would be like going to hear a symphony orchestra and noticing that everyone in the audience was holding a violin case on their lap. That is why I am most pleased when I hear that someone who doesnt generally read poetry (and definitely doesnt write it) enjoys reading my poems. As Joyce Carol Oates put it: the number of people who read poetry is about the same as the number who write it. I would change that to "is slightly less than" because some people who write poetry have no interest in reading it. Strange but true.
Alexandra van de Kamp: Much of the sense of irony and surprise in your poems can stem from a reverence for mundane, near-at-hand things often after the poem has invoked more dramatic, exotic locations and figures. In “The Death of Allegory” you juxtapose “those tall abstractions” of the past against, “The black binoculars and a money clip, / exactly the thing we now prefer, / objects that sit quietly on a line in lowercase, / themselves and nothing more.” This placing of the past against the often humbler artifacts of the present occurs frequently in your work. Can you comment on this?
Billy Collins: It took a long time for poetry to be able to include the everyday, and now it devotes a lot of energy to celebrating it. In mentioning the simple array of things around us, I am trying to evoke a kind of haiku-like presentation of the world in an unadorned condition, without the enhancing lift of metaphor. I think one of the devices that seems to reoccur in my poems is ironic deflation. I use the pedestrian detail--the dog asleep on the floor, the bird out the window--to reverberate against the loftiness of literary tradition. I mean Milton is dead, but the dog is breathing there by my chair. Haiku is saying that the present moment is everything. Nothing exists outside it except two abysses on either side. If one particular moment happens to be filled by a cherry tree in blossom and a sliver of a moon, then to merely mention those things (in a 17 syllable enclosure) is to celebrate the fact that you exist, that you are the only creature in the universe who occupies these exact time/space coordinates.
We live in lower-case times, which is to say allegory is dead. You can no longer open a poem with the figure of Charity, not to mention Chastity, the deadest of the virtues. Underlying this procedure in poetry is the assumption that the things around us--the tree, but also the broom and the ice cube--might hold clues to the world beyond--might provide access to spiritual or at least abstract dimensions. Emerson called it the "speaking language of things," the capacity of the material world to lead us beyond. William Carlos Williams cleared the literary table so that it could be occupied by a simple object. And Charles Simic presents the objects of the world (broom, store window) in a way that all the historic and archetypal significance of the object is gathered into the moment. When I conduct poetry workshops, I ask the poets to take off all the modifiers and see what they have left. Often, what is left is more. The adjective can be a parasite that feeds off the noun and eventually kills it. There's nothing like a good noun standing there on its own. Cup. Hat. Bone. Each one tells its own long story. "Chair" is an epic.
Also, starting small is a way of establishing authority in a poem. If I tell you that I am listening to the rain against my bedroom window tonight, you will accept this without question. Why not? But if I begin a poem by saying that...what?...misery is a snake that curls itself around the neck of the cosmos, you might question who it is that you are listening to, and why. It's no secret. All singers know this: come in soft, go out strong.
Alexandra van de Kamp: Your work in general expresses a very keen awareness of the reader. The Art of Drowning opens with the poem “Dear Reader,” and ends with “Some Final Words,” and your latest book, Picnic, Lightning, begins with “A Portrait of the Reader with a Bowl of Cereal.” There is a wonderful sense of the old epic poems here, with their prologues summoning up the help of the muses. It also reminds me of the narrators in Elizabethan plays who would open and close the performance with an address to the audience. Do you see your books as modern day sequences invoking the reader/muse in the opening pages and closing in the same way? Or does some other concept guide your arranging of poems?
Billy Collins:
You make it so intelligently premeditated, I have no choice but to admit the truth of all you say. I am extremely reader-conscious, perhaps because I am tired of reading poems that seem to ignore the reader. I feel that I am talking to a reader/listener as I write, so that a good deal of my effort is just to make the poem clear. To get things in the right sequence so that the poem is easy to follow. Not just easy, but easy to follow because the poem is going somewhere, and I want the reader along to share whatever surprises the journey may hold. I try to begin the poem on a common ground, which is a way of assembling a little group around the campfire of the poem. Scoutmaster Collins will then tell some scary stories.
In terms of a whole book being reader-friendly, I have opened my last few collections with a kind of prefatory poem whose purpose it is to welcome the reader, to let the reader know I am aware of his/her presence and that this book is aimed at them. Of course, no one reads a book of poems from front to back except editors and book reviewers, but if you read one of my books that way, you would find yourself guided over a certain terrain. I wouldn't want to--would not be able to--explain this progress conceptually, but the book and the sections have a dramatic organization. What I do when I have enough poems for a book is to lay them all out on the floor and to start figuring out which poems want to be with which others. I try to stay out of it and let the poems decide. I think the first and the last poem in a book (and the first and last poem in each section) should show a kind of awareness that they are occupying these positions. But most readers, including me, skip through a book of poems like a flip-book, looking for something to grab their eye--a short poem, a sexy title, whatever. Auden realized the vanity of an author sweating over the arrangement of his/her work when he put the poems in his Collected Poems in alphabetical order, thus eliminating the need for an index. And that is another welcoming aspect of a book of poems: you can jump in anywhere. You can't do that with a novel unless you are merely taking a stylistic soil sample.
I like your idea of the Elizabethan play. Yes, I would like to come on stage before the first act to welcome the reader. I want to get the reader on board at the beginning of every poem. So why not make sure he or she is on board at the beginning of every book of poems by throwing down a welcome mat, an address to the reader before the book (or the play) proper begins? And like anything, it's good to end with a flourish.
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