billy collins interview

7/28/2019 Billy Collins Interview

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Te Old News: an interview with Billy Collins

We sit down in a small back room. Former Unites States Poet Laureate Billy Collins has just nished an open interview/on-stage conversation with Proessor ony Leuzzi at the campus theater, and joinedCabbages and Kings members Luc

Makowski and Mackenzie Swart or a ollow-up interview. We talk or a little while o the record about his laureateshipbeore we begin recording, and briefy discuss the scholarships U.S laureates give to distinguished poets o their choosing.

BC: (laughs)So that was the poet laureateship. You get to do a lot o cool stu, you know, you get invited to embassies and you getto meet a lot o people, more people than you ordinarily would. You can go to any country, basically. And i you tellthem youre coming, theyll have a party or you at the embassy, so I did some o that.

C&K: Who were those two distinguished poets you saw potential in?

BC: Oh, a Russian poet named Katia Kapovich, a mad woman who I met in Russia. She had very long red hair, andshe announced that there was going to be a party or her. Tis was in the White Nights in St. Petersburg, during the


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know? o get more in touch with the way I speak and the way I think and the way I see things. And that meant beingclear to a certain extent. As I said in the interview, the beginning o a poem should be absolutely clear, and then weshould move into some cloudier territories. Something a little more ambiguous, something more conceptually...weird.You begin in Kansas, you end up in Oz. I mean, who wants to stay in Kansas? So the poem should take you to Oz.It should take you to a little weird place thats somewhat disorienting. So I like to start with the reader very oriented,you know, here we are... And then, i you ollow me, I hope to mess you up a little bit. o take you on a siding, tothe point where youre pleasurably disoriented and you dont know exactly where you are. So I think the poems are

readable. But by the end o the poem, I think were at a curious place. And thats where I like to be. A stranger land.

C&K: o some level, a poet speaks or their time. Do you eel that where your poems end up taking the reader is apersonal place, something in your own voice, or more externally conditioned...an exploration o the human condition?

BC: I think every poet knows, i theyre a decent poet, what has come beore them. So they know where they are in asort o timeline. You know, here we are in 2011, and a certain amount o poetic activity has occurred up to this point.And as a poet, you are presuming to jump in at this point in time. So, Im aware o all the poetry (or at least as much

o it as I could read) that is behind me and had kind o inormed me. So Im aware o being at a certain point in time,but I would say its more an idiosyncratic, imaginative journey or me rather than a social commentary. I think thereare many other medias ully devoted to social commentary, like newspapers, editorials, essays...PBS. All that stu.

Summer Solstice. So the party was to be held at midnight. And there she was. It was like a Fellini movie; there werejugglers and midgets and all sorts o weird stu. And she was sitting in a chair. A riend o hers was cutting her hairo. And he was just lopping it o, it wasnt like styling, it was more like a prison haircut or something. So I went overto her, I had to say something, and I asked i she was having her hair cut or her birthday. And she said, Yes.So I asked, What are you going to do with your hair when you get it all cut o?And she said, Were going to take to a cemetery and bury it. And there a monument will grow...made o hair. Andyou will come to worship it.And I thought, Now were getting somewhere...this is why I came to Russia.

Ten another poet called George Bilgere, hes a really good humorous poet who teaches in Ohio.

C&K: I wanted to present an idea: You mentioned vaguely in the orum interview...

BC: Te whole thing was pretty vague...

C&K: (laughs)...you mentioned that you like to take two extremes and try to go in one direction with them, and youtry to almost simpliy things in this way. One o my English proessors has been presenting some o your work to herclass, she reers to you as a readable poet. How do you eel about your poetry being considered readable, and whatinspired you to take that direction?

BC: Well...I just got tired o writing poetry with a capital P. I just wanted to write some poems. And just to talk, you


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diems is that you dont have an infnite number o diems. So you gotta grab them while you can.

So basically, those are the concerns that poetry tends to be very wrapped up in.

C&K: You seem to have a distaste or romantic poetry that relied a lot on meter and rhyme schemes, stu like that.Where do you think that orm theory fts into contemporary poetry, or maybe just your own?

BC: Well thats a good question. I actually have a great love or the Romantic poets. I did my dissertation on

Wordsworth and Coleridge. I mean, I dont like romantic poetry, like, romantic music. Just that its romantic. But Ilove 19th century English poetry. Particularly Coleridge; hes sort o my god, you know? Hes my hero.

So, yeah. Rhyme. I try to write rhythmically; I try to write with my ear as well as my head. I try to write or sound,I try to write or cadence. And most o my revisions when I go back to revise my poems are usually to make thepoem to kind o jump a little better in terms o cadence and rhythm. I dont write in ormal meters; I have a greatappreciation or contemporary ormal poetry. I like inventive rhymes. But even i Im not writing in some kind oorm, like a sonnet, as Im writing Im always sort o seeking some kind o parameters or the poem. So it could be, as

an example, as simple as a stanzaic decision. You get to decide Okay, this poem gets to be in our line stanzas. Andi you look at most o the poems, theyve chosen or themselves a type o stanza. And then I have another obligation. Ihave to write good sentences, good lines, because were writing sentences and lines at the same time as poets, and

Poetry doesnt have to keep up with the news, because poetry is the news. Poetry is the old news.

C&K: As a poet, do you have any one particular thing or concept you enjoy writing about?

BC: I dont think I write about concepts. I think I write about concerns. I like to just start with something simple,and then basically lead the reader and mysel. See, its not so much that Im aware o readers that might be out there,and Im trying to write clear sentences, and Im trying to be aware that someones going to read this. Its much moreselfsh than that. It eels more selfsh when Im writing, because Im the one whos going on this trip. Im the onewhos inventing the trip to go on. Its like laying your own tracks. I dont know i youve ever watched Wallace andGromit...remember when hes laying the tracks as hes on the train? Hes just throwing tracks down as hes going....and it seems like an appropriate image or poetry, that i youre going down someone elses track that already exists,its not a very original piece o work. But youre laying your own tracks and then going there. So its not so much

a concept. Most o the poems are about love or death, you know? Teyre about either how great it is to be alive orhow impossibly unimaginable it is to be dead. So really its all just about these two or three things. Its poems aboutgratitude, about how were alive and that sort o attention to detail, like look at this bird or look at that lake orlook at the reection o light on the water. Whatever that ocusing thing is.

Its not just about nature, writing pretty things about nature. Its saying that i you look careully at this, i you payextra attention, youll be lited into a sense o awareness. And with that will presumably come some kind o gratitudeabout these minutes that are being given to me. Basically its carpe diem. But the reason youre asked to carpe your


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recognizable orm where you can see A-B, A-B or something like that, I think most good poets are imposing somekind o ormal restraints o themselves. Otherwise its a ree-or-all. Form is sociable; orm is what gives pleasure.I mean, the cool act about writing, poetry particularly, which is all about the ego in a way, is that nobody cares.Nobody cares about your internal lie. I mean, think o the people around you: your parents, your riends, even theirattention to you is insucient. Teyre all wrapped up in themselves, whats up with that? Teyre attentions not aconstant on you. So how do you expect a stranger who picks up a Cabbages and Kings magazine to be interested inyour internal lie? Well...theyre not. So when I read your magazine back in my hotel tonight, or tomorrow on theairplane, Im not reading it because I care about any specifc writer or artist, or anybody else. Im going to read this

because I like poetry. And Im looking or a pleasure in poetry. And what delivers that poetry pleasure is orm. Youcould say that orms are like signs o human intelligence, signs that theres been some care in designing the poem. Buti its just, you know, Tis is how bad Im eeling, I dont care anymore than you care how bad Im eeling. We go topoetry or ormal, literary, aesthetic pleasure. I mean, I dont mean to sound cold. But once we receive that pleasure,and maybe I will rom your poem, then Ill be interested in anything you have to say to me. But you have to give methat pleasure frst.

C&K: So to us as a student body, how do you eel your college studies and experience aected your style o writing?

then good stanzas. So were kind o doing three things at the same time: i every stanza is sort o a separate unit, youknow? Its not exactly standalone, but it has the sort o integrity as a stanza. So Im thinking very ormally as Imwriting. I mean, I might come across as sort o a sloppy poet compared to Robert Frost or something, but Im tryingto really...mind my manners...as Im going through. I try to display a sort o etiquette. A verbal etiquette. So its agood question.

You know, it was Whitman who frst got rid o rhyme and meter at the same time. And most o Shakespeare doesntrhyme at the end, its in blank verse. Its iambic pentameter without the rhymes. So it wasnt really Whitman, butWhitman got rid o both at the same time, and then they didnt know i that was poetry or not. And someonesaid, I this is not poetry, this is something better than poetry...something greater than poetry. But some peoplemistakenly think that what happened with Whitman was that poets started scissoring o all the rhymes at the endand just threw them in the garbage. What actually happened in good, sound conscious poetry, poetry that delivers

sonic pleasure, was that the rhymes actually went inside the poem. Tey invaded the body o the poem instead obeing stationed dutiully at the ends o the lines. So I try to have lots o sound eects in my poetry; I try to make itsound like speech. Im manipulating the sounds more than you may think, or more than anyone may hear.

C&K: But you do eel that orm still plays a role?

BC: Absolutely, yeah. I mean, near ormless poetry is a big movement. Tey have conerences, and I would imaginemaybe 20% o contemporary American poetry is ormless. But again, even i were not writing in a


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BC: Frost I think is very teachable. Im always surprised when I hear that my poems are being taught, because Imnot sure what could be said about them. Tey seem totally clear to me. But I always thought poetry should be taughtin high school chronologically backwards. In other words, start students o with something very contemporary, un,easy to get. Not simple-minded or anything, just poems that are very readable and pleasurable. And that deliver somekind o injection o enjoyment immediately when you read them. Ten work back and kind o hook students like that.Teyll say Hey, we dig this. and well say Its poetry. So theyll go, Well, then, we dig poetry.Ten work them back into more demanding poems, back into the 19th century where the language gets a little mustyand less contemporary. But thats interesting that you eel this presumption that youre able to extract meaning rom

these more dicult poems. Tats like throwing you o the deep end. Like, heres how you swim: get in there. Figureit out. Eventually youll learn to dog paddle, otherwise youll drown.

BC: My college experience? Uh...it didnt help it at all. I didnt have a style o writing. I went to catholic high schoolages ago, and I went to college, and most o my teachers didnt really encourage me. I mean, a couple might have....Ithink you guys here have a healthier environment, but a lot o my teachers discouraged me. Tey just kind o passedup my poetry as adolescent dribble and in some cases they were right. But these discouraging teachers had a goodinuence on me. I have a keener appetite or revenge than I do or approval. So i you say to me Oh good, thats a

good poem, Billy. Write some more good poems, I dont like to be patted on the head like that. But i you tell me Icant write, as teachers did, that or me is inspiration. So when I received a phone call rom the Library o Congresssaying I was the United States Poet Laureate, I thought about those teachers. It was just adding a little sugar to theexperience.

BC: Let me ask you a question...When youre in the classroom, what problems do you have with poetry? Is itrustrating at all? How so?

C&K (M. Swart): Ive had a problem in the past when in the classroom, especially back in high school, whenwe would go over a poem and it would just be expected that we would be able to work through it ourselves. Youmentioned earlier about teachers standing between the poem and our understanding o it, but I eel that even at ahigh school level, theres an amount o understanding were already expected to have. And I think the readable qualityo poetry isnt really touched in high school, because its expected that we should be already able to work throughpoems, whereas poetry more like Robert Frost, or your own, is overlooked because its much simpler.

billy collins interview

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