Billy Collins - Review

REVIEWS

With Humor, Poet Lures Fans to the Serious
By Cynthia Magriel Wetzler
The New York Times, Sunday, November 30, 1997
© The New York Times

Billy Collins writes funny poems, poems in which a dog barks out a solo with the oboes in a Beethoven symphony or in which the writer spends the morning shoveling snow with Buddha.

Luring his readers into the poem with humor, Mr. Collins leads them unwittingly into deeper, more serious places, a kind of journey from the familiar or quirky to unexpected territory, sometimes tender, often profound. "I start out on a sociable, welcoming note, standing at the door to the poem," Mr. Collins said recently in the 1865 farmhouse here where he lives with his wife, Diane, an architect.

Readers are taking this journey with Mr. Collins, who was honored as Poet of the Year by Poetry Magazine in 1994, in increasingly large numbers. His newly released CD of poetry, "The Best Cigarette," has sold out in its first pressing. Mr. Collins, a former smoker, chose the title poem in which he muses longingly on memories of smoking, he said, because "it goes against the grain of the new puritanism we're living in.
"Cigarette is a hot and sexy word," he added.

There is a new Billy Collins web site (www.bigsnap.com), which offers poems, biography, photographs, audio files and information on ordering. His latest collection of poems, "The Art of Drowning," published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1995, has out sold all poetry books this year at Posman Books in Manhattan. With five published collections of poetry and a new collection, "Picnic, Lightning," coming out in March from the University of Pittsburgh Press, Mr. Collins, who teaches English at Lehman College York and who will be teaching at Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers next year, is generating enthusiasm for poetry in people who are not usually interested in poetry.

At the Fieldston School in Riverdale in the Bronx last year, high school students greeted him at an assembly with shouts of "Go, Billy!"

"Poetry is my cheap means of transportation," Mr. Collins said. "By the end of the poem the reader should be in a different place from where he started. I would like him to be slightly disoriented at the end, like I drove him outside of town at night and dropped him off in a cornfield."

"There is a wonderfully self-entertaining aspect to all of this. You feel delightfully insane in a way, slipping the bonds of logic."

In a poem entitled "The Dead," he writes:

The dead are always looking down on us, they say
while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,
They are looking down through the glass-bottom boats
of heaven
as they row themselves slowly through eternity.

"It's an unlikely vision of heaven," Mr. Collins said. "I don't know what it means. It's just how they are looking at us. It's pretend."

He said he does not like discussing a poem beyond what he calls ‘its capacity to withstand discussion."

"Poetry is clearly very serious for me, but without heaviness or a glib sense of spirituality," he said. "I wouldn't set myself up that way. I think humor is a very serious thing. I use it as a way of weakening the reader's defenses so that I can more easily take him to something more."

In a poem called "Forgetfulness," he begins:

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of.

And he ends the poem:

No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

The speaker suffers an emotional loss, Mr. Collins said, more than just forgetting a date or a place. "It's deeper and a little melancholy."

Mr. Collins writes for what he perceives to be a literate listener with a sense of humor, he said. "I just sense someone in the room with me," he said. "Poetry has a small but intense audience, like jazz. This lament for the diminished audience is a soap opera, a 'Little Match Girl' of high culture. To me that's ridiculous because the facts are that good poetry is exorbitantly rewarded with grants, travel, fame and positions in universities that were unthinkable 20 years ago. It's a wild time to be a poet."

Last year Mr. Collins went on a national poetry tour, reading at nine colleges in six days. "You're like a Fed-Ex package," he said. "Who would have thought staying up at night pushing little words around would lead to such adventures? People ask me, 'Have you ever tried writing a screenplay or novel?' Like, 'Get real.' It's like asking a jazz drummer, 'Have you ever tried the piccolo?'"

In another poem, "Man in Space," women on a planet of their own stand in a defensive semicircle against men arriving from earth in a rocket.

"It was a feminist moment, that's all," Mr. Collins said, explaining that a poem "is a moment, not a lifelong definition."

"Each poem has its own imaginative field," he said. "Words like feminism or democracy scare me. They are words with barnacles on them, and you can't see what's underneath."

He said that to use language in a clean, precise way is a good reason to write poetry. In the poem "Thesaurus" he writes:

It means treasury, but it is just a place
where words congregate with their relatives
relatives...
all sharing the same picnic basket and thermos.

Mr. Collins concludes:

I would rather see words out on their own, away
from their families and the warehouse of Roget

"When words are put together in fresh ways there is a pleasure-giving quality in language, which brings a release of endorphins," he said.

In his book-lined study, Mr. Collins has two keyboards: a computer at one end of the room and a baby grand piano at the other end. He has been studying jazz piano for seven years.

"I spend lots of time going back and forth from one to the other," he said. "If one isn't working, the other might."

www.bigsnap.com