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.

Moore

People often cite the poet Paul Val�ry as the source of the quote " A poem is never finished; it is only abandoned."  That is actually a paraphrase of Val�ry by W. H. Auden from 1965. (See W. H. Auden: Collected Poems "Author's Forewords.") What Val�ry originally wrote was less of a sound bite: "A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death: for, in relation to who or what is making it, it can only be one stage in a series of inner transformations." But many poets can identify with the sentiments in either.

When do you let go of a poem and stop revising?

An article about Marianne Moore and her continual revision compares her to any contemporary poet who uses software like Word and "tacks changes" leaving digital footprints of where the poem has traveled.


Moore doesn't seem to have ever been satisfied that her poems were completed. Her poem �Poetry,� first appeared in 1919 and was about 30. In the published 1967 version it was down to 3 lines. She also changed titles - "A Graveyard� became �A Grave,� for example.

In the Internet age, we have lots changes made to things published online - from simple typos in a poem or a Facebook post, to Wikipedia entries (always being revised). Lots of revisionist history.

Google Docs tracks each edit to the page. But if you're well known and post a Tweet, then decide to delete it after you get some bad feedback, chances are the original has been captured in a screenshot by someone for posterity.

When is a poem finished for you?  Pre-digital, when I wrote all my poetry in longhand on paper, I saved all the drafts which included revisions and proofreading changes. When I typed the poem, I considered it finished. As a hunt-and-peck typist, retyping something was an effort and I avoided it. When an electric typewriter with a correction tool appeared, and then with the first word processors, it was so much easier that I increased my revisions.

For me, most of my poems are finished when they are published. I can only think of two times when I changed a poem after it appeared in a publication. Perhaps, if I ever make it to the point where I need to put together that "Selected Poems" collection, that will change.

That article views Moore with the ways she changed her work as "more of a digital-age artist than any of her contemporaries. Her poems were as malleable as something written online."

I actually know several very well known poets who still avoid the computer, email and word processing. Two of them have "typists" who interpret their handwriting and print copies which they edit with a pencil and give back for retyping. There may be some thoughtful advantages to that process, and some of you might do the same thing even though you are your own typist.



As another of our online "Conversations," let us know in a comment here about your revision process and particularly how you know when a poem is finished. Are you easy about letting go, or do you revise until as long as you can, like Marianne Moore?

My friend and fellow poet, Adele Kenny, posted one of her writing prompts recently that asks us to think about what one of our poems means. Think of this in the way a student might ask a poet that question.

As a teacher of poetry, I had many students - young and old - ask me what the poet (not present, perhaps long gone) "meant" by a word, line or the entire poem. That should be an easy question to answer if you are the author of the poem, but sometimes it is not easy.

Haven't you heard poets avoid an answer to that question? Perhaps because they don't want to hand you the answer, or because that don't want to trap the poem in one cage of meaning, or because they don't know the meaning for sure either.

Adele quotes Michael T. Young who says that

�When people ask what a poem means, it seems they expect to be led back to some point of origin that is a clear thought, articulated as prose, and which then defines the poem. The problem is that poems emerge out of fog. A poet doesn�t have a thought that he translates into words but more often he has a vague feeling, �a sense of wrong, a homesickness��as Frost called it�that he struggles to find words for. It�s one of the reasons it nearly always stumps a poet to be asked what his poem means."

I recall reading a new poem of mine aloud for the first time many years ago. The poem is titled "Weekend With Dad." After the reading, a woman came up to me and thanked me for the reading and in particular that poem. She said, "I can really identify with that poem because I am a single parent too." I thanked her, But, I am not a single parent.

I thought about, as Adele's prompt asks us to do, what my poem means. To me, it was about spending the weekend with my one son because I was giving my wife time with our newborn second son. The poem was about trying to protect who we are, knowing that we will both age, grow, and change. But I had to admit to myself that the poem and the title certainly open a door to the woman's different interpretation.

This is one of the reasons writers like to be in writing groups and read their poems and be read and hear what listeners and readers think about their work.

When you send your poem out into the world, like a child, it takes on its own life, and you have very little control over its destiny.

"Ars Poetica" is Archibald MacLeish's 1926 poem that references Horace's treatise by that name (translated as "Art of Poetry"), which was written in the first century A.D. Horace's intent was to write a how-to on writing poetry. MacLeish's poem begins:

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown�

A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.

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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