By
THIRSTY
Billy Collins was the Poet Laureate
of the United States from 2001 to 2003 and his latest book of poetry, The Rain in Portugal, is his eleventh
collection. A Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College of the City
University of New York and a Senior Distinguished Fellow at the Winter Park
Institute of Rollins College, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts
and Letters in 2016.
Stay
Thirsty Magazine was honored to visit with Billy Collins in New York
for our second Conversation with him.
STAY THIRSTY: Your latest book of poetry, The Rain in Portugal, contains 56 poems divided into three sections
of 20, 19 and 17 poems respectively. The sections are labeled: One, Two and
Three. How did you decide on this number of poems and on the organization of
them by particular section? Did you intend the reader to take away a particular
feeling or impression from each section?
BILLY COLLINS: I think my habit of dividing a book of poems into
sections is just as pointless as agonizing over the order of the poems. The
reason is that hardly anyone reads a book of poems from front to back, maybe
the editor or a reviewer, and for those few the sections provide a place to
breathe. In my case, each poem is a separate unit, so any attempts at
organization is the author’s vanity at play.
STAY THIRSTY: Your book has the following epigraph: “For a poet he threw a very accurate milk
bottle.”— HEMINGWAY ON RALPH DUNNING (A
Moveable Feast). Why did you choose this particular quotation? How have you
been influenced by Dunning or by Hemingway?
BILLY COLLINS: I like an epigraph to set a certain tone that will be
visible in some of the poems. Hemingway’s calm sentence contrasts nicely with
the violent act of Dunning the poet for comic effect. Is it Papa’s machismo
that causes him to imply that poets are not very accurate throwers? Does he
think that we cannot fish for big game or run with the bulls?
STAY THIRSTY: Day and night play important roles in the poems in this
collection. What do each mean to you?
BILLY COLLINS: Before electricity and gas-lamps, everyone went to bed
when it got dark and woke up a dawn. This made them in tune with the circadian
rhythm of the earth. Mentioning the time of day in my poems anchors the poem to
time and adds to the sense that the poem is taking place in the present of its
own consumption. Few of my poems are about something that happened in the past.
STAY THIRSTY: The cosmos, the stars and the moon are key subjects in
some of your poems. What is it that attracts you to the planets and the
heavens? What is it about the movement of these bodies that influences you?
BILLY COLLINS: Well, gee, we are part of an incalculably huge
universe, which is one of the most nagging mysteries we face. Philosophical inquiry
would be less intense if all that existed was just this solar system. It would
actually seem kind of “cute” compared to the baffling question of space that
just goes on and on.
STAY THIRSTY: There is an inescapable sense of time slipping away
throughout many of your poems in this collection. How do you personally feel
about growing older and has that influenced your thoughts and your writings? Is
having a finely tuned sense of the temporal a blessing or a curse? Do you
personally live in the present or are you always aware of its fleeting nature?
BILLY COLLINS: Originally, poetry was about history, but for the past
few hundred years poetry is about Time, particularly the “romance of time,”
which carries the awareness that our time is limited. It’s very common in poems
to hear the Big Clock ticking or see the shadow of human mortality cross the
page. As one ages, one realizes that time is more important than money; if you
run out of money, you’re broke. But if you run out of time, you’re dead.
STAY THIRSTY: How important is it for a poet to have a sense of
humor?
BILLY COLLINS: The English Romantic poets killed humor, and it took
about 150 years for humor to make a comeback in otherwise serious poetry. These
days, piles of poems make us laugh or smile. I try to write poems where the
humor and the seriousness are in balance. Many such poems can be found in an
anthology titled Seriously Funny. I
would say if you’re not funny off the page, don’t try to be funny on the page.
STAY THIRSTY: You have said that Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s
conversational poems have served as a model for you. What is it about the
conversational style that attracted you? Why did you choose to express yourself
in the “common tongue” style of poetry rather than the “elevated language”
style?
BILLY COLLINS: “Conversational,” which STC never used to describe a
grouping of his own poems, is meant to suggest the common circumstances of
certain Coleridge poems (about six of them) more than their relaxed language. These
poems all begin in a domestic setting—a living room by a fireplace, a
backyard—that is, a familiar place which anchors the meditation of the poem and
welcomes the reader in. The higher meditation of the poems arises from the
domestic reality of the poem’s beginning. I don’t know of any poet before
Coleridge who does that, and I’d be happy to know any precedent for this. The
term “conversation” is lifted from Coleridge’s “The Nightingale: A Conversation
Poem.”
STAY THIRSTY: How important is the reader of your poetry to you when
you are composing it?
BILLY COLLINS: To write is an act of hope, hope that someone will
read it. I aim for a level of intimacy in many poems, which gives the reader a
feeling of being spoken to, being acknowledged. That’s why my poems tend to be
straightforward in the beginning and more complex at the end, more
hypothetical, more speculative, more unusual. I like poems that begin in Kansas
and end in Oz.
STAY THIRSTY: What one key piece of advice do you have for a writer
who wants to become a poet?
BILLY COLLINS: Read poetry until it’s coming out of your ears. It’s
only by reading the poems of other that we learn how to write our own poems. And
I don’t mean just contemporary poems. Read Wordsworth’s “The Prelude,” read
Dante. You will start to get a sense of what the conversation of poetry is all
about and whether you can find a place for you to jump in and join it, adding
your voice to all the others.
STAY THIRSTY: What is next up on your drawing board?
BILLY COLLINS: I’m going to draw a little dog with a big nose who is
looking up at the sky.
(Header photo credit: Bill Hayes)
(Header photo credit: Bill Hayes)
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