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Billy Collins may be
the first poet since Frost to achieve popular and critical acclaim in equal
measure. He’s won NEA and Guggenheim fellowships, and been included in the Best
American Poetry anthologies. He’s appeared on A Prairie Home Companion.
And after a recent reading at a high school, students cheered him on with shouts
of, “Go, Billy!â€
Poetry being the
too-often obscure biz that it is, Collins’ celebrity is a natural subject of
interest to a journalist. And Collins being the sort of poetry-directed guy that
he is, it’s not a subject of much interest to him. He’d rather talk about
poetry, which he describes as “a kind of travel writing,†a genre in which the
poet can take the reader on vicarious trips to places that may be otherwise
inaccessible.
In Collins work, those adventure trips begin by “finding a
common ground that the reader and I can both stand on. I work in a plain-spoken
manner, and try to deliver pleasure by taking the reader into a state of
suspended animation, where the subject matter is left behind, and other
explorations begin.â€
In “I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey’s
Three Blind Mice,†the kitchen and the stereo are rapidly left behind, and we go
into what Collins calls “a hologram,†in which we see the mice in “their tiny
darkness,†and ponder, with the poet,
how did they ever manage to find
one another?
Would it not be difficult for a blind mouse
to locate even
one fellow mouse with vision
let alone two other blind ones?
Hologram-like, the comic plight of these nursery rhyme mice soon starts taking
on depth and pathos, as Collins considers
…the thought of them without
eyes
and now without tails to trail through the moist grass
or slip around
the corner of the baseboard…
Ultimately, as Collins steps back out of the
hologram and into his own life, both poet and reader are enriched by the
experience.
There’s always a reader in Collins’ world, which is a large
source of the strength of his poetry. He strives for “a hospitable quality†in
welcoming that phantom reader into his world. “At a certain point,†he says, “I
began consciously writing against obscurity, and appreciating the virtues of
clarity.â€
Equally important in Collins’ work is his sense of a connection
with the great poets who have preceded him. “In a sense,†he says, “all poems
are about some other poem. You’re always riffing on earlier work. As William
Matthews has said, ‘A poet is never alone. You’re always in the company of the
beloved lines of your predecessors.’†At the same time, he points out, influence
becomes a fascinating dialog across time. “While you are the audience for great
predecessors, they’re your audience, as well. Influence is a two-way street. For
example, Whitman was an important influence on Ginsberg – but because of
Ginsberg, we now read Whitman differently.â€
This sense of history is
important to Collins, and as a teacher, he believes it’s one of the most
important things a young poet has to learn. “The history of poetry is one of
cross-historical conversation. And you have to listen to that conversation
before you can jump in and become a part of it. It’s not just self-expression,
as a lot of young would-be poets think.â€
Originally published in the Woodstock Times
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