Billy Collins Wonders Whether Poetry Will Ever End

The word “irreverent” seems to follow Collins around almost as much as the word “intimate.” Collins approaches the institution of living irreverently, but he takes a knee before life. The most beautiful sound in Billy Collins’ poetry is laughter—the pleasure of strangers, their faraway amusement. It is “the best kind of love,” as he writes in “Aimless Love”—“without recompense, without gifts, / or unkind words, without suspicion, / or silence on the telephone.” 

Collins has sat down across from you, without introducing himself, without shaking your hand. You are strangers to each other. All of a sudden you are swept off your feet. The poem carries you “the way voices are said to carry over water” (from “Carry”). You open your eyes in Chicago (perhaps you, too, are “the same age as Cheerios”); you are smoking in Venice; then in Rome; then at home stuck on a haiku; you are sitting in the theater watching a movie called “Hippos on Holiday,” drinking a large Coke. He is holding your hand as the airplane takes off, as your dog grows old, as you both cross the same river—“No, not the river of life, / a real river” (from “Friends in the Dark”). The water is waist-deep. 

Billy Collins sends you—reading—off to do the same thing you’ve done a hundred times before, as if for the first time. You are in the field of Poetry—“a field where the animals/who were forgotten by the Ark/come to graze under the evening clouds” (from “Poetry”). Collins’ poetry takes place when the everyday splits—the moment of existential awareness, where routine life is shaken by the reminder of mortality—a major theme, of course, in Collins’ work. “Everything seemed especially vivid / because I knew we were all going to die, / first the cat, then you, then me, / then somewhat later the liquified sun / was the order I was envisioning” (from “The Order of the Day”). Collins knows each poem, like life, has the sense of its own ending, and is illuminated by its own brevity, the knowledge of its own typeface mortality, ending where the page runs out. 

Does poetry itself have the sense of an ending? Collins asks “How will it ever end?” (from “The Trouble with Poetry”). He wonders whether there will be a day, or a single moment, “when we have compared everything in the world to everything else in the world.” Then, he says, perhaps the poets can cease breaking into each other’s poems with crowbars, or slicing open the seams of life to see whether the inside is made of cotton or white light and finally have a seat by the window, hands in their laps. Collins and I may agree this future is impossible. If poetry has really ended, the poet will dig up the grave. With such an agreement, I interviewed Billy Collins early this summer. We discussed commas, his experience as the US Poet Laureate from 2001-2003 and the life afterwards, the oxymoron of fame in poetry, literary hoaxes, jealousy, his remonstrance against “personal misery,” and his love of strangers.

BILLY COLLINS: So, House House. There’s no comma between the two houses.

ANNA POPNIKOLOVA: No. It’s just House House. 

BC: Ok, I like the title. I have a book called Water, Water. 

AP: Yes, you do—but there’s a comma. 

BC: Yes, there’s a comma. I like it. We could talk about the comma—my favorite comma is Picnic, Lightning. That’s Nabokov’s comma, but I made it into a book title. 

AP: Are you ready to get started? 

BC: I’m like the Coast Guard. Semper Paratus. Always ready. 

AP: You said in an interview that, after you became Poet Laureate, you thought you might be “the first Christian martyr to be interviewed to death.”

BC: Yeah, that’s pretty funny. You can tell I had a lot of Catholic schooling. That’s one thing that happens with the laureateship—you’re pulled over to the public side of the brain. Instead of writing poems, you’re interviewed about your poems. Robert Hass called me and said, Just try to keep writing your poems, and don’t be completely like Yeats—60-year-old public man. I havebeen interviewed to death. So I’m not going to feel anything from this one that you’re perpetrating now. 

AP: Why do you keep saying yes to the interviews, if you’ve already been interviewed to death? 

BC: I don’t know. That makes me look like an interview monkey.  But there’s the hope that I will come up with something I haven’t said before—it’s remotely possible. 

AP: Since you’ve done so many interviews, you probably know better than I do, but what makes a good interview with a poet? 

BC: Oh, the smaller the question, the better. The worst possible question would be, probably #3 on your list: What’s the future of poetry? I don’t know the future of anything, and if I did know the future of stuff, I would go directly to Tampa Bay Downs, the nearest racetrack, and pick only winners. It’s questions about individual poems that I find answerable, because I was actually there when the poems were written. I don’t sit around reading my own poems, so interviews are an excuse to revisit poems. 

AP: I’ll keep that in mind, and I’ll get rid of question #3 on my list. 

BC: I can go big. I can go oceanic, but I like the sacred miniatures. 

AP: Looking backwards—it’s been more than 20 years since you were laureate—I wanted to ask if you have any new reflections on what the role is, and isn’t, or what it would be nice if it was. 

BC: Well, I think it’s good that we have one. It’s part of our Anglophilia because it’s essentially a British invention. It started in the 17th century with John Dryden, the first Poet Laureate.1 It really should be kind of an obsolete position, because the practical reason to have a Poet Laureate was to have someone to write something that would commemorate an event so that we wouldn’t forget because recording devices were not available. Andrew Motion was the Poet Laureate of England, and someone in the royal family died, so he had to write a poem commemorating it. Those poems would store important events in the national memory. Today we are surrounded by recording devices. Everyone walks around with a camera and microphone in their pocket. There’s no need for a Poet Laureate. These days for the American Poet Laureate it’s become an office to raise interest in poetry rather than to commemorate national events. 

I think Ada Limón’s idea of visiting national parks is very interesting.2 I think it's important to get poems out of the library and out of the classroom. I mean, leave them in the library and the classroom, but also allow them to travel out of there into public spaces. 

One of the good things about the laureateship is that you don’t really have to do anything. You can just sit around and blow smoke rings in your office. There’s no obligation except the guilt you might experience in light of the fact that you’re making zero contribution and not taking advantage of the office.

Robert Penn Warren used his Consultant in Poetry post (the laureateship’s precursor) to write a novel—All the King’s Men. Back then folks holding the post would typically move to Washington and rent a house near the Capitol because it was cheap enough to do that. They got to occupy a beautiful office in the Jefferson Library with period furniture and a view of the Capitol, and the Supreme Court just to your right. Pretty heady stuff.

AP: Have you ever felt famous?  

BC: Once or twice. When I was Poet Laureate, the country was in a pretty rough state.  Not as bad as today, but it was during the run-up to the war in Iraq. Now we look back, and we think, Oh, we’re doing this again… The country was in a state of nervous agitation, uncertain times. So, I was reading at a prep school in Los Angeles, I think, and kids were having their books signed. This one kid came up; he looked about 11 or 12, I guess, and he said 

So Mr. Collins, you’re the Poet Laureate, right? 

and I said Yes, that’s right. 

He said So, um, how many people would have to die before you became president? 

and I told him, I’m not quite sure I’m in the line of succession, for one thing. Looking disappointed, he turned to walk away. I said, Wait a minute; let’s think about this. It would be Congress, the Cabinet. Let’s say about 234 people. The fact that he thought I’d make a better president than George Bush made me feel quite flattered, maybe even a little famous. 

AP: What does it mean for a poet to be famous at all? 

BC: Well, besides murdering somebody, I don’t know how a poet would become famous. You’d have to be famous just for doing poetry. That would be the test, I guess. I suppose, to be famous, you’d have to have a readership. But you’re not famous famous, you’re poetry famous—which is to say, you’re famous within a fairly small circle of people who are even aware poetry exists. It’s sort of an oxymoron, “famous poet,” but if you think you could be famous within poetry circles, that’s all you can hope for. 

Seamus Heaney said, You have to learn how to manage your success, because he became successful internationally very rapidly, and it’s something you have to not get sucked into. You don’t wanna wake up famous, you know? You don’t wanna wake up and brush your teeth and think, I’m a famous guy brushing my teeth right now. That’ll screw you up. 

AP: I’m switching gears a little, but can you guide me through your career? 

BC: I began writing terrible poetry in high school then in college I came under some helpful influences. I was the editor of a literary magazine in college. I majored in English and went on to graduate school and got a PhD. I would’ve stayed in school if they didn’t give me a PhD; I’d still be in school now, but when they give you a PhD, you have to leave, apparently. Then I got a job teaching in the City University of New York where I taught literature for many, many decades. I taught Wordsworth and Milton and Chaucer and Byron and Dickinson—everybody in the Norton Anthology and contemporary poets too. I started getting poems published here and there in better and better magazines, and then came the books. 

I remember early on, I was giving a reading at my college for about 20 people. I was the opposite of famous, whatever that is. I was just unknown. A colleague of mine, Ann Humpherys, introduced me at this reading, and she said When I first knew Billy, he was a professor who happened to be a poet, and look, now he’s a poet who happens to be a professor. I was stunned, because she had totally summed up my life at that point. I had morphed into being a poet. I still taught literature, but they said you should teach a poetry workshop, and I did, right to the end. The poetry very gradually took over. I was a professor for all my life, and then, you know, I got “really famous”—I’m just kidding; you can put that in quotes—I got well known.

AP: Of course everybody probably has a different approach to this, but how do you teach people to write poetry? 

BC: Well, part of it is matchmaking. The only way you’re going to write well is to imitate other people. If you don’t imitate, you’re going to write clichéd poetry and the sad thing is you won’t even know it  because you haven’t read enough poetry to recognize yours as terrible.

So you have to read, read, read, the big English poems like Wordsworth’s Prelude and Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Shakespeare—one thing you learn is this iambic beat. You know, this da da da da da da da da da da, that’s the beat of English literature. I’m not saying you need to write formally metrical poetry, but if you read enough in iambic pentameter, you will start thinking in iambs. You’ll develop this sense of rhythm. You’ll have this iambic clock ticking when you write your poems. You will dance on the page. 

If I have a student who writes a certain style of poetry, I’ll say, Have you ever read Charles Simic? No, or Yes, silly, can’t you tell from my poetry I’m slavishly imitating him, and then I’ll try to match them up. I’m trying to find a poet that makes this poet insanely jealous. Jealousy is really the emotional engine that drives creativity. It’s not so much to just develop an interest in these other poets. You have to be really sick with jealousy, that you haven’t, that you can’t, write a poem as good as they can—but you’ll try. 

AP: Who are you jealous of? 

BC: (laughing) Well, these days there’s no one left but being jealous of myself. 

AP: Who did you used to be jealous of? 

BC: At first, every poet who was published, then I focused in.  Charles Simic was a strong and abiding influence. I went through a lot of phases. I was a Richard Brautigan fan in the 70s. I wrote a lot of bad imitations of Richard Brautigan, which some editor actually pointed out to me when he sent my poems back—he said It sounds like third-rate Brautigan. Well, that’s what it is. Good editor!

I learned different things from different poets. From Whitman, I learned intimacy. I try to be very alone with the poet in my poems. If you read my poems extensively, you wouldn’t find many other people in there. I want to be alone with the reader; I don’t want any competitive presences. As an only child, one of the reasons I got into poetry is that it increased my sense of being alone. I was like an aloneness freak. I loved being alone. I used to do things to make myself feel more alone, like writing poetry. If you don’t like being alone, you should not write poetry. 

How do I teach? I don’t know if you can teach poetry. You can kind of conduct poetry, you could provide a kind of fairly safe atmosphere. It would be safer if I weren’t there, but a fairly safe atmosphere—it’s the beginning of your public life as a poet. That’s why you’re not allowed to talk except at the end of the discussion, when it’s too late to chaperone your poem, or defend it. You just have to shut up and pretend you don’t exist anymore, and the others in the room are strangers who picked up a magazine somewhere and started reading your poem. 

The love of strangers. One of those big phrases that I like. You don’t want only your friends to read your poems, you want strangers—people in Nebraska and Alaska, all over the place, to read your poems. Fame is tied to attracting the attention of strangers. You can’t be well known just with the people you know, people down the street, that’s not enough. 

AP: No.

BC: You could think that in the 4th grade—maybe that you’re the coolest kid in the class—but that runs out pretty quickly. 

AP: I was wondering if you ever read any of your students, or strangers’ work that imitated you? 

BC: Yes, I mean, I have a couple poets—I don’t think I’d name them—but the influence kind of shows. I mean, they have copied some of my mannerisms. Like the poem beginning in very casual places. The poet is at home looking out the window, or at the backyard; the poet’s often in a very domestic setting. 

I learned that directly from Coleridge. “This Lime-tree Bower my Prison,” which is one of my favorite poems. It begins “Well, they are gone, and here I must remain / This lime-tree bower my prison!” He begins the poem with a Well. Very casual at the time, and even now. So, I know poets who can pick up on some of that, and they try to be humorous, and some of them are. 

AP: How does it make you feel—that people would read your poetry and be jealous of it—and want to imitate it? 

BC: I could sit by myself in a room for 300 years, and I would never think about that. 

AP: Okay. A colleague of mine, who I bumped into the other day, I told him I was interviewing you, and he said he interviewed you a number of years ago— 

BC: See, see, I told you—everybody’s interviewed me. 

AP: He said that you told him something along the lines of, you didn’t want to be “another poet on the conveyor belt of misery”. 

BC: Right. 

AP: And, what does that mean? 

BC: It just means that the content of poetry is, I think, generally personal misery. 

AP: And you don’t like that.

BC: Oh, it’s not that I don’t like it. I mean, I don’t like reading poems that are just about personal misery, that started with the British Romantics, for example, Keats—“My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains.” Or,“I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!”—that is Shelley, being pretty melodramatic about it. I guess my comment was really about the limits of poetry whose content is just autobiographical misery. Or really, autobiographical anything. My poems try to be lighter and more able to achieve some kind of flotation. Even the way the poem looks on the page, I try to make it—if a stanza looks kind of dense to me, then I’ve used too many big words. I try to open it up and prune it so some air can get through. 

Like arborists, when they’re treating trees, and the tree is not diseased or anything, there’s no problem, but they prune the tree so that air can pass through it. And trees seem to appreciate that. One of the things I do when I revise a poem is look for a stanza that looks like it’s a traffic jam of words, and I try to lighten up the lines. 

So, even when I’m writing about a serious topic, I’m still trying to make sure all the windows and doors are open. 

AP: Is that what you think the difference between poetry and prose is? 

BC: Well, the difference between poetry and prose is that poetry is a bird and prose is a potato. That’s basically it, in a nutshell. 

AP: A little bit. 

BC: Someone said poetry happens when the limits of prose are exhausted. Poetry will take over at that point and express things that fiction can’t express. Also, fiction is about other people, and poetry is not about other people—it’s about the poet. 

This is not new, but it’s a metaphor I like—I think of people who write drama or fiction as people who are looking into the windows of other people’s houses. They’re spying on them because they’re interested in what other people are thinking and how they behave. Whereas the poet is inside the house looking out at the world and telling the reader what he or she sees. That’s why I like being a professional only child, that’s why poetry is a good fit for me. Poetry doesn’t require an interest in other people.

AP: The one thing I wanted to ask you about—not necessarily about the future of poetry, don’t worry—is that over the time you’ve been in the literary world, reading and writing, what are the changes you’ve seen, and how do you feel about them, in terms of poetry? 

BC: Well there’s a lot of it, that’s for sure. I couldn’t live without poetry, and I’m always looking in magazines or whatever. I'm always looking for poetry, not the old definition of poetry, but poetry that really has gone a little beyond poetry. If you’re a poet, you don’t want to be writing “poetry”—that’s poetry we already know. Kenneth Koch once said, There’s something laughable about just the existence of poetry. I agree with that. 

And is it Tony Hoagland or Mark Halliday who wrote about the arrogance of poetry? Now, poets, how dare they? They just start talking in the middle of the page. Where do you get the authority to claim all this knowledge, and insight into human life—who are these people? 

I don’t know about the trends in poetry. There’s more of it, a lot of it is identity-based poetry, poetry that has a cause, a kind of agenda going on—that just means that the poem is trying to persuade the reader of something. I like poems that don’t have a persuasive attachment in mind.  Anyway, poems like that are usually trying to persuade you to hold the position you already hold. Injustice is bad. I get that.

Yeats has a poem, Do you know the poem “On Being Asked for a War Poem”? 

AP: Yes. Of course.

BC: “I think it better that in times like these 

A poet's mouth be silent, for in truth 

We have no gift to set a statesman right; 

He has had enough of meddling who can please 

A young girl in the indolence of her youth, 

Or an old man upon a winter’s night.” 

AP: What is the point of writing a poem, for you? You don’t want to persuade them of anything, but what do you want? 

BC: Pleasure. I want the reader to receive poetic pleasure. The poem is laid out in a way that the reader can follow, so I’m like the guide, there to produce road signs and turn signals, to guide the reader through the poem. I’m also in search of an ending, and I’m trying to get to a point of

settlement where I’m finished talking, and you don’t want to hear anymore—a point where there’s a sense of it being over. 

Poetry has what some call a non-continuation bias. That’s what keeps it from being prose. We don’t continue out to the right side of the page, right? We turn back. We turn back to revisit the body of the poem. 

AP: Right. 

BC: And the other thing is, we’re done, very often, in one page. We don’t even want you to turn the page, to make it really easy on you. Where prose continues right to the end of the page, and it goes on for hundreds of pages—like War and Peace— 

AP: I just finished that one. 

BC: Did you really? 

AP: Yeah, I did. 

BC: Well then, you know what I’m talking about. You were probably hoping it had a non-continuation bias, but no. 

AP: Yes. 

BC: It just continued and continued. 

AP: No, it never stopped— 

BC: Well, good for you. It’s nice. I just finished reading the Iliad again, recently. 

AP: I have two more questions, and then I’ll set you free. 

BC: I’m enjoying this. It’s effortless; the questions aren’t really demanding, and I’ve had just enough coffee today.

AP: I’m lucky. I wanted to ask you—I know I probably should talk about something more recent,  but I can’t help myself. The first book of yours I read was Sailing Alone Around the Room, and the poem from it I really loved was “Paradelle for Susan”—it’s different from a lot of your other work. I just wanted to take, I guess, this opportunity to hear you talk about that poem which I really love. 

BC: Well, that’s a hoax, right? 

The story behind it is that I want to write  a really bad poem. Auden said there’s nothing funnier than a badly written formal poem. Of course, you have to know how to write a good one before you write a bad one—I thought I’d write a really bad sonnet. But then I realized that no one will… you know, there are so many bad sonnets, it would be indistinguishable from the mass of terrible sonnets. 

So, I thought, I’ll make up a form. You know, I’m a recovering medievalist—I started a dissertation on medieval literature, so I made up this incredibly stupid form, in which the first few lines, you repeat them, duh, and then there’s this mind-cracking demand to use all the above words and make sense of it. And then there are the remaining words, like “the” and other stuff that didn’t fit. 

I sent it to Joseph Epstein, the editor of The American Scholar, which is the magazine of Phi Beta Kappa society. I knew he had a sense of humor. He had published a parody of Wallace Stevens of mine earlier, and he published it [“Paradelle for Susan”], and thought that was great. Then he called me up after the issue came out, and he said We’re getting a lot of mail… people complaining about this horrible, mangled poem. 

These are Phi Beta Kappa people, but apparently with no literary sense of humor. So he said, I’m thinking of printing this one, and maybe you’d like to reply, in letters to the editor. The guy was going on and on about how bad the poem was, and then he said This is the worst paradelle I’ve ever read. But it was the only paradelle in existence. I figured, here’s an opportunity, and I kept the hoax going. In my reply, I said, Listen, this is an incredibly difficult form. You know, I tried my best, and I said, You seem to have a lot of time on your hands; you try one. I had such fun with it. 

Then, a woman in Georgia called me up, and said that she wanted to do an anthology of paradelles, because a lot of workshop professors were assigning paradelles. I thought, This is getting really good now, and she said, Would you write an introduction? and I thought, What better person? Of course I would.

Anyway, she got back to me and said it was really hard to find these paradelles. She was looking everywhere—and then I realized she’s an assistant professor; she’s probably trying to get tenure and stuff, so I said—This is a joke. And there was this horrible silence. And I said, But look, it’s a joke we can, um, play with. We can run with this. It’s, uh, you know, very postmodern. It brings up the whole idea of what is authorship, what is real, you know, uh, belief, all sorts of cool stuff… and she said OK. In the introduction, I confessed, as I am now confessing to you.

You know, literary hoaxes have really gone out of style. I was really proud. The form paradelle actually made it into a Dictionary of Literary Terms.  Now I can die a happy man. 

AP: No, it’s a great story. My last question is the obligatory press question. Are you working on anything new? 

BC: I had a book come out called Dog Show, last year— 

AP: I have it sitting right next to me. 

BC: Oh, good for you. It’s a handsome little book. I shouldn’t say this, but the first printing sold so fast, the press ran out of copies. But now it’s back in print. I’m actually working on—it doesn’t take a lot of work, by the way—my complete poems. That’s basically the tombstone. Once you publish the complete poems, then you can just get out the watercolors, and someone will put a blanket over your knees and find the sunny spot for you out back on the lawn. And maybe, if you’re lucky enough, you could find some opium to cruise through your final days. I think the title will be simply Billy Collins, Poems, 1977 to 2027—50 years, right?

It’s sort of the end, like in the cartoons, you know: That’s all, folks!