Poetry world

Billy Collins isn't particularly fond of social media. You don't find him in person on Twitter or Snapchat or Facebook or YouTube, but you will find lots of him and his poetry there via posts from others.

When Collins sat down with NPR for a reading on Facebook Live recorded at the Georgetown Public Library, it drew a large virtual crowd.

If you missed, the archive of the Internet has saved it for you.

He reads several poems and talks about the writing process and the life of a poet - or at least his life as a poet.



On how to be a poet, his main advice is to read. And practice.

"It's such dull advice. There's no key to it. It really lies in the simple act of reading tons of poetry. And I mean not just stuff you find in magazines but if you really want to be trained in poetry you need to read Milton � you need to read Paradise Lost. You need to read Wordsworth � you need to read Wordsworth's 'Prelude'... That's if you want to take it seriously. If you don't want to take it seriously, you can just get a 79-cent pen and express yourself. No one's gonna read it with any pleasure because ... you haven't paid attention to what happened in the past."

Unlike many poets, when Collins writes a poem he is hoping it is good enough to be published, but if it is not working, he doesn't "fret the poem" (as Robert Frost said) - he lets it go.

"The waste basket is the writer's best friend," he says.



A question that is often asked of poets and about poetry is "What's the difference in hearing a poem read aloud versus reading it silently?"

Collins also talks in greater detail about one of his poems, "Cosmology."

This poem begins before we had science to explain the universe and we looked for a visual representation of cosmology. Collins begins with and rejects the mythology of the Earth balanced "on the back of a sea turtle / who is in turn supported by an infinite regression / of turtles disappearing into a bottomless forever."

But his thoughts move towards a less scientific visual of the planet being balanced on Keith Richards' head.

Now that we are on the subject,
my substitute picture would have the earth
with its entire population of people and things
resting on the head of Keith Richards,
who is holding a Marlboro in one hand
and a bottle of Jack Daniel�s in the other.
As long as Keith keeps talking about
the influence of the blues on the Rolling Stones,
the earth will continue to spin merrily
and revolve in a timely manner around the sun...

But the poems circles back to the opening thought as, like those turtles, he imagines Keith

standing on the other Rolling Stones,
who are standing on the shoulders of Muddy Waters,
and, were it not for that endless stack of turtles,
one on top of the other all the way down,
Muddy Waters would be standing on nothing at all.

Billy Collins�s twelfth collection of poetry is The Rain in Portugal (Random House). It is a sign of Collins' popularity - and saleability - that his most recent books have been first released in hardcover, unlike most poets who go straight to paperback. His last three collections were New York Times best-sellers, and that is not typical for poetry.

All that is great. I love his poetry. But it also gets him a certain amount of dismissal by some. They say he is light and goes for the the laugh too often. Yes, if you hear him read there will be laughter. I'll see him this week at the Dodge Poetry Festival in New Jersey. I've heard him read at many Dodge Festivals. I spent a week in workshops with him on Long Island just before he became U.S. Poet Laureate (2001�2003). There were lots of laughs. But there is always more to a Billy Collins poem than the funny line that you laugh at and remember.

Take as an example his poem �Mister Shakespeare.�  As a teacher, I like this poem, set in a classroom where the poet is teaching "Introduction to Literature." The poem recalls Collins' earlier poem, "Introduction to Poetry" - a favorite of teachers.

In that earlier poem, the teacher wants students to enjoy the poem and "to waterski / across the surface of a poem / waving at the author�s name on the shore." Unfortunately, all the students want to do "is tie the poem to a chair with rope / and torture a confession out of it. " They have been trained that way. "They begin beating it with a hose / to find out what it really means."

Now, in the newer "Introduction to Literature," the teacher is again angry with students for their formality. Why are they thinking that they are being respectful calling the poet "Mr. Shakespeare?" It's just Shakespeare and it's just Hemingway and just Frost. They wouldn't watch the Yankees and call him "Mr. Jeter" or call the quarterback "Mr. Brady."  Why the formality with the poets?

And what about Frank Bidart? Well, when living poets are called only by their last name it sounds "so final."  And now we are at that place when the poet becomes reduced to academic "subject matter," like those poems the students wanted to beat into submission, all of this  is �enough to make us forget where poems begin.�
And where is that?

maybe in the upstairs room of an anonymous boy,
his face illuminated by lamplight.
He has penciled some lines in a notebook
and now he pauses to think up some strange and beautiful 
       title
while the windows of his parents' house fill with falling
       leaves.

We come full circle. Famous poet and poem begin with anonymous poet and first poem.

Billy Collins is that famous living poet who was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. But many of these poems are escapes from all those who have tried to reign in his fun along the way: 1950s America, the 16 years of �the full metal jacket of Catholic education,� even the limited exposure he had to poetry.

In "The Present," he opens with a chuckle

"Much has been said about being in the present,
it's the place to be according to the gurus"

but it's not an easy job, as any Zen practitioner knows, because the present is "always in a state of vanishing" and finding your way is tough because "no one, it seems, is able to give you directions."

In �Genuflection, he recalls that he was told of the Irish habit

of tipping the cap to the first magpie
one encounters in the course of a day
and saying to him �Good morning, sir,�

An odd tradition, "But why wouldn�t every bird merit a greeting?"

For example, that great blue heron he sees by the shore, standing as motionless "as a drawing on papyrus by a Delphic priest." For that heron, not just a good morning, "will anything serve, short of a genuflection?"

And that word recalls how

As a boy, I worked on that move,
gliding in a black cassock and white surplice
inside the boundary of the altar rail
then stopping to descend,
one knee touching the cool marble floor
palms pressed together in prayer,
right thumb crossed over left, and never the other way around.

In that week of workshop sessions with Collins (Is it okay to just use his last name?), he reminded us that since many of us had been English majors, that meant we had actually majored in death. Billy, the Catholic altar boy, had been well schooled in death early on.

In the poem "Greece," we are looking at the ruins that "were taking their time falling apart" and also seeing the very alive bathers on the beach below. But between those two, the poet writes down:

Is not poetry, a megaphone
held up to the whispering lips of death?

Death floats in and out of these poems. There is more mortality lurking in a drive through the town found in �Helium� and even in a store �Balloon Designs by Pauline� that has a good chance of outliving him - though probably not as long as those Greek ruins.

Is the poem "On Rhyme" on rhyme, or on poetry?  We all remember some poems and some rhymes that are not poems - the stitch in time that saves nine, the 30 days that have September. It sticks in the head. But Collins prefers a "Little Jack Horner sitting on a sofa / old men who are not from Nantucket." And so, rather than the rain in Spain that falls mainly on the plain, he imagines:

"... the rain in Portugal,
how it falls on the hillside vineyards, 
on the surface of the deep harbors

where fishing boats are swaying, 
and in the narrow alleys of the cities
where three boys in tee shirts 
are kicking a soccer ball in the rain,
ignoring the window-cries of their mothers."

It's a rebellion. And you didn't even know it. That's what humor can do.

There is a wide range of ways poets have written about mothers. Poets.org collected a few examples as we approach Mother's Day.

I have posted several times poems concerning mothers.

Burt Kimmelman's poem "Taking Dinner to My Mother" served as a model for one of our writing prompts. Looking at it again now and thinking about another post I made the year my mother would be 92 feels strange to reread because my mother didn't make it to her December birthday that year.

I wrote about a Mary Oliver poem and how my mother might react to it. Burt's poem is knowingly about his mother just before she died.

But Mother's Day shouldn't be a sad day, even if your mother is gone, it is a time to think of the happier moments. Maybe read some funny poems by Hal Sirowitz from his collection Mother Said.
Or recall something as in Li-Young Lee's "I Ask My Mother to Sing" or this old poem for children by Robert Louis Stevenson.

To Any Reader

As from the house your mother sees
You playing round the garden trees,
So you may see, if you will look
Through the windows of this book,
Another child, far, far away,
And in another garden, play.
But do not think you can at all,
By knocking on the window, call
That child to hear you. He intent
Is all on his play-business bent.
He does not hear; he will not look,
Nor yet be lured out of this book.
For, long ago, the truth to say,
He has grown up and gone away,
And it is but a child of air
That lingers in the garden there.

But my favorite poem for my mom might be one by Billy Collins about a small gift we might give on this day as a child before we knew "that you can never repay your mother," I made at least one of the lanyards that Billy wrote about giving to his mom and I found it after she died in a wooden box that I had made in Cub Scouts along with some other small gifts I had given her.  I was just as sure of their value as Billy. And we were right.

In "The Waste Land," T.S. Eliot wrote:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

But I think you should think of April as National Humor Month as well as being National Poetry Month.

Why not save get your dull roots out of the spring pain and rain and save time by combining both of those celebrations by reading (or listening) to some humorous poetry. You might want to start with some  Billy Collins.

Some thoughts by Billy Collins on poetry

• The mind can be trained to relieve itself on paper.
• You come by your style by learning what to leave out. At first you tend to overwrite�embellishment instead of insight. You either continue to write puerile bilge, or you change.
• In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.
• High school is the place where poetry goes to die.
• A sentence starts out like a lone traveller heading into a blizzard at midnight, tilting into the wind, one arm shielding his face, the tails of his thin coat flapping behind him.
• Poetry is my cheap means of transportation. By the end of the poem the reader should be in a different place from where he started. I would like him to be slightly disoriented at the end, like I drove him outside of town at night and dropped him off in a cornfield.
• The first line is the DNA of the poem; the rest of the poem is constructed out of that first line.
• A lot of it has to do with tone because tone is the key signature for the poem. The basis of trust for a reader used to be meter and end-rhyme.
• A motto I�ve adopted is, if at first you don�t succeed, hide all evidence that you ever tried.

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