When you read a poem by Billy Collins, you don’t feel like you’ve stepped into a room where you don’t belong, although you might expect to since he is a former U.S. poet laureate.
The title alone, which Collins held from 2001 to 2003, has such weight, connotes such achievement. There’s a whiff of intimidation about it.
Then you read a verse on his thoughts about stepping into the surf, or about how he struggled for hours to get a banal 1970s pop tune out of his head after he’d heard it on the radio. That’s when you realize there’s a place in the room for you, the person who gave up trying to read poetry long ago, yet who realizes how difficult it is to write something elegant, brief and knowing.
On Monday, Collins will read and discuss his work at a free event at noon at Emory University’s Cannon Chapel. (He’s also reading today, but the tickets are gone.)
At 70, Collins has sold more than 1 million copies of his books. A few years ago he received a six-figure advance for a three-book publishing deal. His latest book is the bestselling “Horoscopes for the Dead,” released in April by Random House. He’s now a Distinguished Professor of English at the Lehman College of the City University of New York. If you’re a public radio listener, you may have heard Collins read his work on any number of shows. That has caused some critics to say that his work isn’t formal enough, that it’s too pop in nature.
But Collins doesn’t see poetry as something that should be walled off. To his mind, everyone should be welcomed into the room they choose to step in.
Here Collins talks about his work, what inspires him and what Georgia’s new, yet-to-be-named state poet laureate should keep in mind when he or she is appointed by Gov. Nathan Deal.
On calling his poetry “middle class”: “I regret making that comment. It’s one of those things that comes back to haunt you. I think the spirit in which I said that is that my poetry didn’t have a radical, political agenda. My poetry draws less on the literature of the Beat [poets] and protest literature and more on Chinese poetry, because even though some of the poems have a comic streak, generally they’re trying to achieve some kind of peacefulness.”
On why most people don’t read poetry: “I really stopped guessing why people don’t read poetry. I’ve sort of come to the conclusion that the reason people don’t read poetry is that they don’t read poetry. I don’t think it goes any deeper. The common excuse was that poetry was too difficult. I don’t buy that. My analogy is like with me and hockey. I don’t watch hockey on television, and the reason is I just don’t watch it. I have no interest in it. I don’t care if it’s violent or not, I’m just bored by it. So I really think it’s as simple as that. People are busy doing other things.”
On writing every day: “I’m a writer every day, but I don’t write every day. Every day I’m looking for those ducks to land on the water, or something to nudge me toward the page. But I don’t really have any compositional habits. I’m afraid it’s still kind of a romantic view of writing. I have to wait for something to startle me rather than just hacking it out every day. But it doesn’t take much to startle me. My stepdaughter, who was 16 a couple of years ago, was doing all these drawings of princesses and fairy tale castles and fantasy stuff. Fair enough. But one day she came in with a little drawing of a scallion on a plate and I wrote a poem about it because I thought that she was moving from one phase to another. She was moving out of fantasy into the simplicity of real things.”
On his work being interpreted by other artists, visual as well as musical: “A dozen animators have taken poems and animated them. I’ve read the poems in the studio and got to approve of all the animation. It was for the Sundance Channel and then it got onto YouTube. Many people have set my poems to music and the results have been disastrous, unlistenable interpretations. I used to say, ‘You want to set my poems to music? OK, go ahead. I’ve already set them to music with my ear when I wrote them, but if you want to set them to actual music, go ahead.’ Now I’d say, ‘No, you can’t set my poems to music.’ It happened about nine times and every one was worse than the one before. It was like loud opera singing. My poems are to be whispered into a microphone or into someone’s ear.”
On performing recently at the White House with former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove, the rapper Common and comedian/author Steve Martin: “The word poetry is so enormous that it contains the quiet, technical little sonnets as well as hip-hop and protest performance poetry. If people want to shift back and forth, that’s fine. You can read Emily Dickinson and you can like Common. Rita Dove and I were at the White House last year with Common. We were on the same bill as Steve Martin and we mixed it up. We put on a performance for the Obamas and the guests. It was a great thing for the first lady to create a day that featured poetry in the White House.”
On his tenure as U.S. poet laureate: “Basically I started a program called Poetry 180. The idea was for high schools. One poem for every day of the school year. The big emphasis was: no discussion, no analysis, no explication, no papers, no quizzes. Just read the poem and leave it alone. Just put it in the ear of your students to get them to enjoy it by relieving them of the anxiety of having to analyze it. So the idea was to make poetry more a part of everyday life than just purely a subject matter to be studied in a classroom like some verbal form of trigonometry. The other motive behind Poetry 180 was to bring students up-to-date on poetry. Any anthology or textbook that is going to be used in the classroom, the poems in there are 75 to 100 years old, and that’s the youngest ones. Poetry 180 was saying, ‘Here’s what poetry sounds like now, today and you don’t have to analyze it.’”
On what Georgia’s incoming poet laureate should keep in mind: “The best thing you can do is to write really, really good poetry. You can be an advocate, but the best you can do to spread the word of poetry is to write really good poetry. The other thing is, [poet] Robert Hass called me up when I became poet laureate and he said, ‘They’re going to be pulling you, interviewing you to death, dragging you from one place to another. Just don’t leave the place where you write your poetry. Don’t give up that psychological spot where the poetry comes from because they will try to drag you out of there and make you a public figure.’ Being a poet is a very private activity and you have to hold onto your solitude.”
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Event preview
Billy Collins, former U.S. poet laureate, in a “Creativity Conversation”
Noon Monday. Free. Cannon Chapel at Emory University, 515 S. Kilgo Circle. 404-727-5050.
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