Billy Collins
Billy Collins
William James "Billy" Collinsis an American poet, appointed as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. He is a Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York and is the Senior Distinguished Fellow of the Winter Park Institute, Florida. Collins was recognized as a Literary Lion of the New York Public Libraryand selected as the New York State Poet for 2004 through 2006. He isa teacher in the MFA program at Stony Brook...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth22 March 1941
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
When you put a poem on a Kindle, the lines are broken in order to fit on the screen. And so instead of being the poet's decision, it becomes the device's decision.
When I was a young man, I understood that poetry was two things - it was difficult to understand, but you could understand that the poet was miserable. So for a while there, I wrote poems that were hard to understand, even by me, but gave off whiffs of misery.
My poems tend to have rhetorical structures; what I mean by that is they tend to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. There tends to be an opening, as if you were reading the opening chapter of a novel. They sound like I'm initiating something, or I'm making a move.
I'm very aware of the presence of a reader, and that probably is a reaction against a lot of poems that I do read which seem oblivious to my presence as a reader.
I'm happy to stick with my persona. There are themes of love lost and love regained, but the main themes of all poems are basically love and death, and that seems to be the message of poetry.
I'm all for poetry catching up with technology, and just as there are iTunes, I think we should have iPoems. I mean, people should be able to walk around with their earbuds in and listening to poems on their iPod.
I try to write very fast. I don't revise very much. I write the poem in one sitting. Just let it rip. It's usually over in twenty to forty minutes. I'll go back and tinker with a word or two, change a line for some metrical reason weeks later, but I try to get the whole thing just done.
I think it's good not to make demands on the reader too early. But as the poem goes on, I want the journey of the poem to lead into some interesting places.
I find a lot of poetry very disappointing, but I do have poets that I go back to. One book of poetry that I'd like to mention is 'The Exchange' by Sophie Cabot Black. Her poems are difficult without being too difficult.
I don't think I've ever written a poem whose intention was just to be funny. I've written poems that start out funny and often shift into something more serious.
I am increasingly attracted to restricting possibility in the poem by inflicting a form upon yourself. Once you impose some formal pattern on yourself, then the poem is pushing back. I think good poems are often the result of that kind of wrestling with the form.
Attempts to put my poems to music have had disastrous results in all cases. And the poem, if it's written with the ear, already has been set to its own verbal music as it was composed.
A lot of my poems either have historical sequences or other kinds of chronological grids where I'm locating myself in time. I like to feel oriented, and I like to orient the reader at the beginning of a poem.
When you put a book together and arrange it, there's a lot of anxiety and turmoil about what order the poems should be in.