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The New York Times labels Billy Collins as "the most popular poet in America." Poetry fans, ever sensitive to overstatement, know Collins as perhaps the most charming writer to ever grace verse.
Whether or not you care for Collins' breezy way with poetry, often parodied but never equaled, there's no denying his versatility. His best-selling 2001 collection, Sailing Alone Around the Room, bridges the poetic divide between literary devices, ranging from poems such as "The Death of Allegory," an erotic underwear catalog in "Victoria's Secret," and cooking to jazz music, "I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey's Version of 'Three Blind Mice.' "
As U.S. poet laureate from 2001 to 2003, Collins wrote "The Names," one of the first known poems in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He'll read that poem in a recorded broadcast for PBS, days before taking a plane to Utah, where he'll speak Sept. 8 at Snow College in Ephraim. He took his phone interview from Washington, D.C.
Do you blush when people compare you to Robert Frost?
No, I'm just quick to correct them on the comparison. Compared to Frost, my poetry is like a bed that hasn't been made in six months. Frost was a genius in observing the rules of formal poetry — rhyme and meter — and yet made his poems seem as natural as a song. I can't do that. I sound natural, but I follow a much less restrictive set of rules. The only point of comparison, really, is that we both sold a lot of books in our time.
Did your view of poetry's place in the public sphere change after your tenure as U.S. Poet Laureate?
I never had great hopes for some kind of explosive change in the poetry-reading population of America. It's gotten smaller since the 19th century because of competition from other media. Also, people's absence from poetry is based almost completely on how poetry was presented to them in school. Often that absence is based on a bad memory, because when most people are exposed to poetry in school it's often anxiety-inducing.
You're often credited with making poetry casual and approachable. The advantage of that is obvious to most people, but do you see any disadvantage to making poetry seem too easy?
The only thing I should be credited with is writing my own poems. I'm not trying to change poetry one way or the other. I'm just trying to write one poem at a time, which is difficult enough. I've been accused of being underconceptualized. But for me? No, I don't see any drawback.
You care deeply about poetry education. How would you lead someone to the difficult verse of Milton or Donne?
Contemporary poets can create that link. Once you've established readers in current poetry, they can then go back to the more demanding poets of the past. You can preserve the continuity in poetry by moving backward just as easily, if not more, than moving forward. That was all part of how I felt while putting together the high-school anthology Poetry 180. You can start with Ginsberg, then read Whitman, then read Milton and Donne.
A lot of poetry fans quote Clive James' saying that "originality is not an ingredient of poetry. It is poetry." Do you like aphorisms that define poetry in neat, tidy ways?
I like collecting those little definitions. Kenneth Burke said poetry was "the dancing of an attitude." When James said poetry "is originality," it really seems another way of saying that writing poetry isn't writing poetry. True poetry is not writing what's immediately recognized as poetry. The best example of that is Walt Whitman. No one thought of Leaves of Grass as poetry. Someone said of Whitman, "If that's not poetry, it is something greater than poetry."
You read your poem "The Names" during a congressional session just short of the Sept. 11 attacks' first anniversary. Ten years later, what are your feelings about that poem?
Like a lot of poems, it's stabilized mostly by imagery taken from the natural world. I don't feel like I have to blow the dust off it. I've only read it twice, once before Congress, then at a college four years after Sept. 11. Who knows, I could put it in a later anthology, but I've never wanted to make it part of my repertoire. Only once in my life before have I written a poem for a specific occasion. The other was the 300th anniversary of the Trinity School in New York City.
Why do you think other nations are comfortable with artists or poets in leadership positions, such as playwright and poet Václav Havel serving as first president of the Czech Republic, but Americans are uneasy about artists in politics?
I think some of us tend to be embarrassed that we don't read it. Sometimes that embarrassment turns into hostility. It's a thorny question. I've traveled in Russia, Italy and, recently, Finland. You get a sense that people respect poets there. It's not even a pious respect, just a feeling that being a poet is a legitimate occupation. The U.S. media is no help whatsoever. The movie "Dead Poets Society" was just awful, with its portrayal of teaching and poetry as something heroic. But poetry goes along, with or without an audience. Small audiences tend to be very intense audiences. Frankly, if I got on an airplane and everyone was reading poetry, I'd be a little alarmed.
What's your next big project?
Trying to write a poem about dining alone. I've always thought there was a special skill involved in going to a restaurant by yourself.
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—
The Names by Billy Collins
Yesterday, I lay awake in the palm of the night.
A soft rain stole in, unhelped by any breeze,
And when I saw the silver glaze on the windows,
I started with A, with Ackerman, as it happened,
Then Baxter and Calabro,
Davis and Eberling, names falling into place
As droplets fell through the dark.
Names printed on the ceiling of the night.
Names slipping around a watery bend.
Twenty-six willows on the banks of a stream.
In the morning, I walked out barefoot
Among thousands of flowers
Heavy with dew like the eyes of tears,
And each had a name —
Fiori inscribed on a yellow petal
Then Gonzalez and Han, Ishikawa and Jenkins.
Names written in the air
And stitched into the cloth of the day.
A name under a photograph taped to a mailbox.
Monogram on a torn shirt,
I see you spelled out on storefront windows
And on the bright unfurled awnings of this city.
I say the syllables as I turn a corner —
Kelly and Lee,
Medina, Nardella, and O'Connor.
When I peer into the woods,
I see a thick tangle where letters are hidden
As in a puzzle concocted for children.
Parker and Quigley in the twigs of an ash,
Rizzo, Schubert, Torres, and Upton,
Secrets in the boughs of an ancient maple.
Names written in the pale sky.
Names rising in the updraft amid buildings.
Names silent in stone
Or cried out behind a door.
Names blown over the earth and out to sea.
In the evening — weakening light, the last swallows.
A boy on a lake lifts his oars.
A woman by a window puts a match to a candle,
And the names are outlined on the rose clouds —
Vanacore and Wallace,
(let X stand, if it can, for the ones unfound)
Then Young and Ziminsky, the final jolt of Z.
Names etched on the head of a pin.
One name spanning a bridge, another undergoing a tunnel.
A blue name needled into the skin.
Names of citizens, workers, mothers and fathers,
The bright-eyed daughter, the quick son.
Alphabet of names in a green field.
Names in the small tracks of birds.
Names lifted from a hat
Or balanced on the tip of the tongue.
Names wheeled into the dim warehouse of memory.
So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart. —
Poet Billy Collins
When • Sept. 8, 12:30 p.m. convocation program and 7 p.m. lecture
Where • Eccles Center for Performing Arts on Snow College campus, 300 N. Center St., Ephraim
Info • Free. Call 435-283-7458 for more information, or visit http://www.snow.edu.