STEVEN BARCLAY AGENCY
featuring
BILLY COLLINS
United States Poet Laureate (2001–2003)
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Aimee Mann, Billy Collins dish on each other
Billy Collins, former U.S. poet laureate, and indie music star Aimee Mann, an Oscar-nominated songwriter, visit the Wells Fargo Center tonight for an
evening of poetry and music. (Associated Press file photos)
By JOHN BECK
FOR THE PRESS DEMOCRAT
April 18, 2014, 3:00 AM
Aimee Mann and Billy Collins first met at the White House.
She, the tall, blond singer of literary proportion and often tragic tone, still laughs at the thought: “We
met at the White House, which is a sentence I may never utter again.”
He, the poet of everyday life and the wondrous world around us, would like a revision: “I'd like to say
we met at White Castle having a burger one night, but we actually met at the White House, which
sounds like a big residential name-drop.”
Hosted by President Barack Obama in 2011, the salon tribute to American poetry landed all over the
map: Steve Martin was there with his banjo, Common with his street rhymes and Alison Knowles with
her Fluxus performance art.
But somehow the two to really hit it off were the 53-year-old L.A. singer and the 73-year-old East
Coast poet.
Apropos for the setting, Mann sang “Save Me,” one of the songs she's most famous for, along with
“Voices Carry,” the 1980s hit from 'Til Tuesday, the band in which she sang.
Collins, the former U.S. Poet Laureate, made the Obamas laugh with “Lanyard,” a deceptively simple
poem about much more than braiding plastic strands at summer camp.
As performers are wont to do, they talked about performing together one day. But, unlike most
performers, they actually meant it.
A few phone calls later and now they're embarking on an unlikely three-date mini-tour up the coast
from Malibu to Santa Barbara to Santa Rosa.
Before they share a stage at the Wells Fargo Center tonight, we asked each one to talk about the other.
Billy Collins on Aimee Mann: 'Edgy and casual'
Q: What was your first impression of Aimee Mann?
Billy Collins: Well, she's very pretty. I'm afraid that's my first male impression. But brushing that
aside, I like how she fits her music. Her music feels both edgy and casual. I like the work she does with
minimal instrumentation, where her voice is in the foreground. It's a very winning voice, very
seductive and intense. And at the same time, it's very relaxed.
I like that she sang “Save Me” at the White House that day.
Save us all. Save me and everybody else.
Do you go all the way back to the 1980s 'Til Tuesday music in her catalog?
No. I learned about her within the last four or five years. I would listen to her on music feeds like
Pandora.
How did this tour come to be?
We came up with this idea of collaborating and it seemed like a good excuse to spend some time with
her, in a selfish way. And it also seemed like a jumping into the unknown.
Will the two of you perform together on stage?
Well, we're not sure yet. It's clear that I'll do what I do best, which is reading poems, and she'll do
what she does best, which is singing. But I think there will be some back and forth. She has a song,
“Voices Carry,” and I have a poem called “Carry,” which is a love poem, which uses the same
metaphor about voices carrying over water. The poem starts, “I want to carry you and for you to carry
me the way voices are said to carry over water.” So I think in these three performances we'll make
discoveries along the way that fit together.
How do you prepare?
Well, we've had some exchanges, but I don't think either of us likes to overthink something like this.
One aspect of it that will be new to both of us will be having the conversation. I'm not sure when that's
going to happen, but we're going to sit down and talk about our creative process and I think we both
want to be surprised by what the other one says. My fantasy would be we both get up and harmonize
for an hour — she gives me a tambourine and I harmonize like Phil Everly.
So you've got pipes?
I've got a pipe.
Aimee Mann on Billy Collins: 'A dapper gentleman'
Q: Before you met, were you aware of Billy Collins' poetry?
Aimee Mann: Very vaguely. I think like a lot of people, I always thought you had to be a real egghead
to read poetry. I don't know what I was thinking.
What was your first impression of him?
A very dapper-looking gentleman. He had a touch of “sitting on the veranda.” But I thought what he
had to say about mastering form before you really become concerned about having your own
particular voice — I thought that was really interesting and I really wanted to hear more of that. So
when someone suggested that we do shows together I thought this would be an opportunity to hear
him expound on those ideas.
How do you imagine the night unfolding?
I think we'll read some poems, play some music, do a little chatting, possibly deconstruct a couple of
things during the conversation, maybe take some questions and then play more music and read more
poems. I think to a certain extent we'll have to play it by ear because it's such an unusual setup.
He described it as jumping off into the unknown. Is there a risk to this?
Yeah, when you plan your own show you pretty much know what you're getting into. This is not only a
show with somebody else but a show with a totally different discipline and different approach. But I
feel like his vibe is so nice and we have enough things we've talked about that we can probably pass
the ball back and forth pretty gracefully.
Are you one of those people who would rather not over-prepare for a night like this?
No. I don't have that much confidence in my ability to wing it, so I have thought about things, like if
we're talking about process, things I would want to say.
Why do you think people are so interested in the creative process?
I don't know, but one of the ways I actually prepared for this is to go back to the introduction in
Stephen Sondheim's book “Finishing the Hat,” because as a great lyricist and also overall cranky,
opinionated person he really says all the things I think and feel about lyric writing. So anything I say
will be 98 percent quotes from him.
(John Beck, director of “The Monks of Vina,” writes about entertainment for The Press Democrat.
Reach him at 280-8014 or john@beckmediaproductions.com.)
Why Billy Collins Is America’s Most
Popular Poet
by Austen Rosenfeld Oct 22, 2013 5:45 AM EDT
He’s read by many—you can even find his poems in New York City subway cars—but what makes Billy
Collins so loved? Austen Rosenfeld reads the latest collection to see what’s special about a Billy
Collins poem.
On Aug. 31, a black and white photograph of Seamus Heaney filled the space above the fold of The New York
Times. A close up of the late Irishman’s face, with his hard eyes that seem to be staring somewhere much
farther than the day’s news, was a startling image to see while opening the paper on a Saturday morning.
Two-time poet laureate of the United States Billy Collins. (Jill Toyoshiba/Chicago Tribune, via Newscom)
It’s a rare occurrence that a poet graces the front page of The New York Times. In fact, there are only a
handful of instances. The death of Adrienne Rich was one example. A publishers’ dispute over the poems of
Billy Collins was another.
It’s not surprising that Billy Collins is among the select few who have made it to the front of the paper. Collins,
two-time poet laureate of the United States, has often been called America’s most popular poet. His books sell
in numbers unheard of in the poetry world, and his readings are consistently jam-packed. In that way, Collins
follows the footsteps of Robert Frost, a widely read public figure of his day, who once said, “there is a kind of
success called ‘of esteem’ and it butters no parsnips.”
Collins’s career as a poet started late. For years he worked as an English professor, and he tells me that the
dream of being a poet was “completely aspirational.” When he speaks he is casual and spontaneous, as if
talking to an old friend, but can also at times still have a professorial tone about him. He wrote poems as a high
school student on the side, but was never too serious, for fear of failure or mediocrity. Collins recalls that he
only started writing seriously in his late 30s and early 40s, somehow becoming popular over the next decade,
and transforming from what one colleague called “the professor who happened to be a poet to the poet who
happened to be a professor.”
One reason for Collins’s popularity is simply that readers have encountered his work. Collins places his poems
in the public eye, on the New York City subway or the backs of Metro cards. “I’m a great believer of poetry out
of the classroom, in public places, on subways, trains, on cocktail napkins. I’d rather have my poems on the
subway than around the seminar table at an MFA program,” Collins says.
Another reason is that his poems make you feel included. The diction is simple, the humor is soft and his
subjects deal with the relatable details of daily life. “He’s not an intimidating poet in that respect,” says Alice
Quinn, the former poetry editor of The New Yorker and the current executive director of the Poetry Society of
America, of which Collins is the vice president. “He’s like listening to wonderful jazz—and I mean classic jazz. I
don’t mean easy listening jazz.”
‘Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems’ by Billy Collins. 288 pp. Random House. $26.
Collins places his poems in
the public eye, on the New York City
subway or the backs of Metro cards.
Other readers, however, are less enthusiastic about Collins’s poems, claiming that they lack a heft and
substance that people seek in poetry. “A Billy Collins poem” has even been used as a pejorative term in certain
workshop settings. But perhaps an academic setting is just not where they belong.
Aimless Love, Collins’s latest collection, is a compilation of the past 10 years of his writing, starting from 2002,
and including more than 50 new poems. These poems exist in the place where human creativity and logic
intersect. Each line is a hallway, leading the reader down an extension of Collins’s own strong analytical
inquiry. They are important reading for any young poet trying to understand how clarity and logic are
prerequisites for exploring imaginative worlds.
Collins is not an elliptical poet; he does not leave gaps. Instead he fastidiously organizes and fleshes out the
fantastical worlds of his own making. Take the poem “The Four-Moon Planet,” which begins with the epigraph
from a notebook of Robert Frost’s: “I have envied the four-moon planet.” Collins begins, “Maybe he was
thinking of the song / ‘What a Little Moonlight Can Do’ / and became curious about / what a lot of moonlight
might be capable of. / But wouldn’t this be too much of a good thing?” Collins is an archeologist of the
imagination, turning over every stone of possibility as he moves through the poem.
“Cogitation” is the word Alice Quinn used to describe them. “The poems are vessels, they’re very shapely, and
they do contain something transformative,” she notes. “They’re very alive, like a Calder mobile. There’s an
atmosphere of agitation and cogitation.”
Whereas some poetry ignores its reader and seals itself in a shell of its own construction, Collins engages with
his audience. One of the ways he welcomes the reader with open arms is through humor. He’s pretty much
always funny; it is part of his aesthetic, his poetic DNA. “There’s something very authentic about humor, when
you think about it. Anybody can pretend to be serious,” Collins says. “But you can’t pretend to be funny.”
There is a breezy contentment to many of Collins’ poems. In “To My Favorite 17-Year-Old-High School Girl,”
Collins writes: “Frankly, who cares if Annie Oakley was a crack shot at 15 / or if Maria Callas debuted as Tosca
at 17? / We think you are special by just being you / playing with your food and staring into space.” Reading it,
you sense something pleasing, and slightly sad, too, about surrendering to the happiness that results from
ordinary life.
Collins’s new poems contain everything you’ve come to expect from a Billy Collins poem. They stand solidly on
even ground, chiseled and unbreakable. Their phrasing is elegant, the humor is alive, and the speaker
continues to stroll at his own pace through the plainness of American life. But Aimless Love is not aimless. It’s
measured and thought-out. Just as Collins writes at the end of his poem “Grand Central,” (one that’s displayed
on subways around New York City) you always know “just when and where you are.” “There is no radical
development once one has a persona,” Collins tells me. “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.” Collins pauses. “It’s great to be alive, but it’s all going to end, and the shadow of
mortality falls across the page,” he says.
I ask Alice Quinn what she thinks is the most important thing about Billy Collins’s poems. “The important thing
about them is they exist,” she says.
POET, LOVER OF WWI BOOKS, AND SERIES ON ANIMALS
Billy Collins
By Amy Sutherland
| GLOBE CORRESPONDENT
FEBRUARY 15, 2014
Billy Collins
Billy Collins, perhaps America’s best-known poet, may have retired from the college classroom, but he’s still teaching. He
does that by giving talks and readings around the country. Lesley University’s Boston Speaker Series brings the former US
poet laureate to town for a reading at 8 p.m. On Feb. 26 at Boston Symphony Hall. Tickets are available only through a
season subscription. He’ll read from his new collection “Aimless Love.”
BOOKS: What are you reading currently?
COLLINS: I just came back from an annual literary gathering in Key West, and this year’s theme was crime
writing. I don’t read detective novels, but now I have a stack of them, one by Lee Child, one by Michael
Connelly, one by Scott Turow, and the one I started, “Holy Orders” by Benjamin Black, John Banville’s nom de
plume. I don’t have high hopes for my progress in this genre. I just reached the point where plot-driven novels
don’t hold my interest because I don’t care about the fate of characters anymore — whether Emily marries Tom
or not, that kind of thing.
BOOKS: What kind of novels are you drawn to?
COLLINS: Ones in which not much happens, but they have great sentences. That would cover Banville’s other
novels. Among fiction in which nothing happens my favorite authors are José Saramago, particularly
“Blindness,” and the late Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard. Both authors seem terribly negative, which I like.
Nothing much happens in their books except everything gets worse.
BOOKS: Have you always been drawn to the negative?
COLLINS: I think the comic negative. Discovering Samuel
Beckett in college was a big deal for me. I realized you could
be very funny and very dark at the same time. Whenever I go
to a Beckett play I always notice that the audience divides
itself into the ones who are laughing and the ones who are
looking disapprovingly at people laughing. I’m one of the
people laughing.
BOOKS: Do you read mostly novels?
COLLINS: I read a lot of nonfiction too, including a number of World War I books, such as “The Great War
and Modern Memory” by Paul Fussell, which I should have read a long time ago, and Geoff Dyer’s “The Missing
of the Somme.” What I really like these days is this series by Reaktion Books, these beautifully illustrated books
devoted to one animal, say pigs, lobsters, or owls. I have 15 of them. You can fit them in a purse or a trench coat
pocket. I’m reading “Bear” now, and it covers everything I want to know about bears.
BOOKS: Any other subjects you are drawn to?
COLLINS: No. I find myself filling holes like the Fussell. That’s one of those books you’ve heard about so
much that maybe you don’t have to read it. I reviewed a book called “How to Talk About Books You Haven’t
Read” by Pierre Bayard. It’s sort of tongue-in-cheek, but it actually shows how you can absorb books through
reading reviews and through conversations. Freud is a good example. Very few people have actually read
Freud, but everyone seems prepared to talk about him in that Woody Allen way. To read Freud is not as much
fun.
BOOKS: Which poets do you read?
COLLINS: Mostly poets I already know. I’ve been reading a lot of E.E. Cummings and Edna St. Vincent
Millay. I always go back to Philip Larkin. I’ve lost interest in finding the cutting edge, if there still is one. When
I became poet laureate I was in a slightly uncomfortable position because I think a lot of poetry isn’t worth
reading.
BOOKS: Do you have any tricks for teaching poetry?
COLLINS: When I was teaching, I always made my students memorize a poem and recite it. If they forget
everything else I said, which is probably the case, they’d at least have that poem stuck in their heads. I met a
student on a subway in NYC who I had had 15 years or so earlier. He had become a doctor. He insisted on
reciting this Emily Dickinson poem for me on the subway. AMY SUTHERLAND
Poet for the people
Billy Collins pens poems for those who think they don’t like poetry
BY NANCY STETSON
nstetson@floridaweekly.com
WHEN IT COMES TO CONTEMPORARY POETS, Billy Collins is a rock star.
The New York Times has called him “the most popular poet in America.”
A two-term United States poet laureate, Mr. Collins has read his poems on Garrison
Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion” numerous times and has been interviewed by
Terry Gross on NPR’s “Fresh Air.” He’s even given a TED talk, showing five animated
shorts of his poems.
When The Sanibel Library announced him as the March 3 speaker in this year’s Author
Series, people lined up before sunrise to wait for tickets, which were quickly snatched
up. (To be put on a waiting list, call 472-2483.)
According to the library’s website, “No poet since Robert Frost has managed to
combine such high critical acclaim with such broad popular appeal.”
Although his poems have been published in The New Yorker and The Paris Review, Mr.
Collins is far from being a literary snob; he’s also appeared on “The Colbert Report” as
part of what he describes as a “rather vigorous” book tour in which he visited “15 or 16 cities in 18 days,
with just about every conceivable media stop, including ‘Colbert.’”
Billy Collins writes poetry for the masses Though he’s used to speaking to crowds and being on radio and,
occasionally, television, the thought of appearing on “The Colbert Report” was “amazingly nerve
wracking,” he says, explaining that Stephen Colbert is “just very slippery. He has a persona … and he can
switch around on you.”
Publicists from Random House, Mr. Collins’ publisher, told him to just be himself.
Before the show went on the air, Mr. Colbert stopped by the green room. “He was very congenial,” Mr.
Collins says. “He said, ‘I’m going to be an idiot, and you’re just going to be yourself. Allow me some room
to be a jackass.’
“And once we sat down at the table, and I was sitting in the hot seat there, it became very entertaining …
It all went very well.”
The two even read one of Mr. Collins’s poems, “To My Favorite 17-Year-Old High School Girl,” alternating
verses.
“He connected me to a huge audience, a much younger demographic, which is good for me — and good
for book sales,” he says.
The interview, which can be seen on YouTube, was part of his book tour for “Aimless Love: New and
Selected Poems,” Mr. Collins’ 10th and most recent collection of poetry.
Inspiration of youth
Like many teens, Mr. Collins wrote poetry when he was in high school. “I look back and wince at the whole
thing,” he says of his fledgling poems. “I didn’t publish until I was in my 40s, and didn’t take off until my
50s.” His career, he adds, was as a professor of literature.
Like most young poets, he started out by imitating poets he
admired, including Wallace Stevens and Lawrence
Ferlinghetti.
“Instead of being inspired by these fellow poets, I was
writing in a parody of their work, a slavish imitation,” he
says. “I think in that period, I was learning something about
language, just by writing. That’s how you learn to write, by
writing.”
SUZANNAH GILMAN / COURTESY PHOTO His early poems were published in Rolling Stone magazine.
“It paid $35 a poem, and back then a pack of cigarettes was
a dollar, so you could buy 35 packs of cigarettes,” he says.
It wasn’t until he was in this 30s that he found a voice that expressed his sensibilities, Mr. Collins says.
“Then it took another five or so years until I was published.”
For a while, he published books with the University of Pittsburgh Press. He made the switch to Random
House, a bigger, more commercial publishing house, when they made him an offer he couldn’t refuse: a
six-figure advance for a threebook deal, which is unheard of for poetry.
Random House promoted his books and sent him on multi-city tours. He gave readings all over, often
selling out venues, which one time led The New York Times to claim he “caused the literary equivalent of
Beatlemania.”
In 2001, Mr. Collins was named Poet Laureate of the United States, a position he held for two terms,
through 2003. During his tenure, he initiated the Poetry 180 project, which encouraged high school
students to read a poem a day for the 180 days of the academic year. The project branched out into two
books: “Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry” and “180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day.”
The anthologies, he says, were “for people who gave up on poetry after school, who hadn’t kept up with it
and wanted to get back into it, who were curious about where poetry has gone since they’d stopped
reading it in school.
“If you picked up the 180 anthologies, you have 180 poets there, and if you liked one of them, you could
look up their work. It was a gateway anthology.”
He also recorded poems for Delta Airlines that people could listen to while they flew. The poems, his own
and others’, would revolve around one subject, such as animals, nature or love, and would be interspersed
with jazz.
An off-kilter sensibility
Mr. Collins writes poetry that appeals to people who think they don’t like poetry.
In his poem “Cheerios,” he writes about discovering he’s older than the breakfast cereal. In “Hell,” he
writes: “I have a feeling that it is much worse/than shopping for a mattress in a mall.” In “My Number,”
he wonders hopefully: “Is Death miles away from this house/reaching for a widow in Cincinnati/or
breathing down the neck of a lost hiker/in British Columbia?”
His poems are at once whimsical and realistic, droll and full of surprise. They’re filled with dogs, snow,
mice, jazz, books and death.
They’re playful.
For example, “Looking for a Friend in a Crowd of Arriving Passengers: A Sonnet,” says, for the first 13
lines, “Not John Whalen,” and concludes, with relief, with “John Whalen” as the 14th line. It’s a sly and
clever recreation of waiting for a friend at an airport.
Even his book titles, which come from his poems, display his off-kilter sensibility:
“Horoscopes for the Dead,” “The Trouble with Poetry,” “Undressing Emily Dickinson,” “Picnic, Lightning.”
In an interview with The Paris Review, Mr. Collins said, “I want to start in a very familiar place and end up
in a strange place” in his poetry.
In his poem “Introduction to Poetry,” he writes: “I ask them to take a poem/and hold it up to the light/like
a color slide/ or press an ear against its hive.” Unfortunately, the students are both tone deaf and
colorblind. They don’t want to swim in the poem but instead feel they need to decode it.
“But all they want to do/is tie the poem to a chair with rope/and torture a confession out of it./They begin
beating it with a hose/to find out what it really means,” the poem concludes.
Mr. Collins believes many intelligent, well-educated people are afraid of poetry, something he attributes to
the way it’s taught in school. “They begin to think of poetry as a subject in school — like trigonometry or
astronomy or something,” he says. People think poetry is even less useful than trigonometry. “And we
pretty much know we didn’t need trigonometry after we got out of school,” he adds.
To those who think poetry is too hard to understand, Mr. Collins says it becomes less difficult the more
you read it. “Reading prose does not prepare us, in any way, for reading poetry,” he says. “It’s a different
skill set, a different set of awareness. It involves a different language awareness and language process.”
But, he admits, “Some poetry is impenetrable. I’m not interested in reading that either … To me, some
poetry is too difficult and some is too easy. I like poetry that’s making reasonable demands on my
attention.”
He’s been quoted as saying that 83 percent of poetry isn’t very good and says that, as poet laureate, “I
didn’t want to go out and bang the drum for poetry and say we should read more, because a lot of it is
boring.”
Though his poems are often humorous, they’re not light verse, like Ogden Nash’s poems.
“I actually like Ogden Nash,” he says. “The difference is, with Ogden, the poem has to be funny all the
way through. It starts out funny, continues funny and ends funny, so pretty much every line is humorous.
“The difference between that and using humor in a more serious way is that humor is used as a door into
something more serious, a way of breaking down the reader’s resistance. A poem can start very funny and
turn serious; the humor in the beginning is a seductive device to bring readers in, before the poem turns
more dark, more complex, or deeper in some way.
“And the opposite is true. A poem can start serious and then suddenly stop taking itself very seriously and
end on a lighter note. In that case, you’re deploying humor. Ogden Nash is the humorist throughout.”
Humor is epistemological, he says, a way of looking at life.
“I don’t sit down and try to be funny,” he says. “I just pretend to see things from odd angles. It’s pretty
fruitless to sit down and try to be funny, to make humor a goal, to sit down and be very serious about
being funny. Unless you’re naturally funny, I don’t think it’s going to hold up on the page.”
For him, humor is a strategy rather than an end in itself.
“I’m not there to amuse the reader,” Mr. Collins says. “I’m there to explore something. And if humor is
one part of the exploration, that’s all the better.” ¦
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This new collection will cause Billy Collins fans to fall in love all over again.
By Elizabeth Lund / October 22, 2013
Aimless Love, by Billy Collins, Random
House, 288 pages
Enlarge
Billy Collins has become hugely popular in part because he changed the way readers
perceive poetry. Now, with Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems, he is once
again changing the way people experience his work, and both new and old fans will
be delighted.
Collins has always been masterful at breaking down barriers for readers and
employing an everyman’s voice that sounds familiar, perceptive, and prescient. He
knows how to write layered, subtly witty poems that anyone can understand and
appreciate – even those who don’t normally like poetry.
Those strengths are evident here, where both writer and reader benefit from the
careful selection of poems from Collins’s last four books, spanning 2002 to 2011. The
strongest poems seem stronger, and every poem feels necessary. The old really does
seem new.
The collection opens with the poem “Reader,” where Collins addresses those who
might peruse the book – from skimmers to English majors and perfect strangers – as
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he continues “rushing to the window” or “picking up the phone/ to imagine your
unimaginable number.” That familiarity gives one permission and an invitation to enter
the poems that follow.
From there, Collins makes a seamless shift to “The Country,” from the section "Nine
Horses," which begins, “I wondered about you.” The continued familiarity forms a
bridge that helps new readers delve into the work and explore the subjects and
perspective that begin here and run throughout the collection. Experienced readers
will also appreciate that shift, the first of many times when poems seem to speak to
one another, which heightens their richness and resonance.
A few pages later, the title poem demonstrates another reason why Collins has earned
almost rock-star status, enabling him to fill large auditoriums. The poem begins with a
bemusing comment that articulates the joy many people feel about the mundane
pleasures of life: “This morning as I walked along the lakeshore,/ I fell in love with a
wren/ and later in the day with a mouse/ the cat had dropped under the dining room
table.”
As the poem progresses, Collins moves from observation to association: “This is the
best kind of love, I thought,/ without recompense, without gifts/ or unkind words,
without suspicion,/ or silence on the telephone.”
Collins’s wit and insight allow him to broaden the poem with every stanza and convey
universal feelings without sounding coy. So many of his poems leave readers feeling
as he does several lines later: “But my heart is always propped up/ in a field on its
tripod,/ ready for the next arrow.”
Nature, poetry, love, and mortality are threads that appear in each section and weave
together over time to create a memorable portrait of the poet who – at his best – is wry,
surprising, and effortlessly communicates the thoughts many readers wish they had
thought or said themselves.
As the collection unfolds, the associations made in the poems become deeper and
broader. Collins becomes increasingly aware of death – a bookend one can’t ignore –
and the importance of the poet’s role. By “Horoscopes for the Dead,” from 2011, the
work is sharper, bolder, and more taut than before. The last poem is perhaps the most
surprising because Collins is so content in the moment that does not feel the need to
put pencil to paper:
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"Not even that dark cormorant
perched on the No Wake sign,
his narrow head raised
as if he were looking over something,
not even that inquisitive little fellow
could bring me to write another word."
In this pruned, essential version of the work, that thought is cause for alarm. The
Collins in these pages is distinctive, evocative, and knows how to make the genre fresh
and relevant in an age when commercialism lowers standards and encourages
bestselling writers to produce copious amounts of work.
The new work shows that Collins does indeed have more to say, and readers should
spend time with these poems, many of which are quite good. As Collins thinks about
missed seasons, travel, and “living a life of continual self-expression,” he shows the
importance of constant re-examination and discovery, which is vastly different from
treading familiar ground.
Even readers who may have felt that they had tired of Collins’s work will appreciate the
intuition and striking language in poems like “The Music of the Spheres,” which
describes “that chord of seven notes,/ one for each of the visible planets,/ which has
been sounding/ since the beginning of the universe,/ and which we can never hear.”
Elizabeth Lund is the Monitor's poetry critic.
Related stories
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Billy Collins
By KATE MURPHY
Published: November 16, 2013
Billy Collins is a best-selling poet who served as poet laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. His
latest collection of poetry is “Aimless Love.”
READING I’m a nearly uncontrollable Geoff Dyer fan, who I think is one of
the most comically brilliant writers today. His little book, “The Missing of the
Somme,” about how World War I is remembered in England, led me to Paul
Fussell’s monumental “The Great War and Modern Memory,” which views the
war very much through the lens of its poetry.
Let’s see, I just reread Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American,” which managed
to stimulate my dormant Catholicism. A couple of months ago I prepared for a
trip to Russia by reading Mikhail Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita” and
“Moscow to the End of the Line,” by Venedikt Erofeev. As for poetry, I am really
struck by Sophie Cabot Black’s new collection, “The Exchange.” She’s concocted
a way of speaking in poetry that’s very fresh and daring.
LISTENING I’ll listen to anything authentic whether it’s bluegrass or gospel
or blues. A Buck Owens song called “Heart of Glass” has been stuck in my head
lately. He played a sort of a comic buffoon on “Hee Haw,” which resulted in the
beauty of his voice being underestimated. I put him just below George Jones in
terms of being able to sing beautiful country ballads and harmony. I also like
the Mavericks and the Spin Doctors. My favorite gospel group is the Swan
Silvertones. And I could listen for days straight to Maxine Brown singing “All in
Gregg Matthews for The New York Times
My Mind.”
WATCHING I’m still in a mild state of post-“Breaking Bad” shock. But that hasn’t kept me from digging into a
boxed set of Natalie Wood movies a friend sent me, knowing that she is my one and only lifetime screen love.
Her tragic end only cemented my love for her. “Bombers B-52” is behind me, and “Inside Daisy Clover” — what
a title — lies ahead.
FOLLOWING I am a nonparticipant of social media. I’m not much attracted to anything that involves the
willing forfeiture of privacy and the foregrounding of insignificance. So I can proudly say that I’ve never
tweeted, but I am struck by the apparent coincidence of the 140 characters — sounds like a Balzac novel — and
the 140 syllables in the Elizabethan sonnet. Instead of tweeting that you had great pizza tonight, why not read
some haiku by Buson? Doesn’t poetry seem just right for our ever shrinking attention spans? O.K., never mind.
REVVING I’ve long been into motor sports, everything from Formula 1 to Nascar. I started to follow racing
back in the days of Stirling Moss and Jackie Stewart, the “Flying Scot,” and I got hooked on Nascar years ago
after spending an afternoon witnessing the “Sundrop 400” at the Hickory Motor Speedway in North Carolina,
the tightest track on the Nascar circuit.
COLLECTING I have a stack of those plastic card hotel room keys that I picked up on this latest book tour.
It’s about a yard tall. Ah yes, a stack of lonely nights.
Kate Murphy is a journalist in Houston who writes frequently for The New York Times.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on November 17, 2013, on page SR2 of the New York edition with the headline: Billy Collins.
Billy Collins is the 2013 recipient of the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize.
Monitor staff
Monday, April 29, 2013
(Published in print: Tuesday, April 30, 2013)
Billy Collins has been selected as the fourth winner of the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize in American
Poetry. He will receive the annual award, which carries a $3,000 prize, and read his poems in Concord
on Oct. 3.
Collins, a 72-year-old former U.S. poet laureate, has published 13 books of poems, including
Horoscopes for the Dead (2011). He is known for the accessibility and humor of his poetry. A native of
New York City, he is a distinguished professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York
and teaches in the master of fine arts program at Stony Brook Southampton.
Although U.S. poets laureate are not required to write occasional poems, Collins agreed to do so after
the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York. Around the first anniversary of the attacks, he read “Names” at
a joint session of Congress.
Wesley McNair, Maine’s poet laureate and a longtime friend of Hall’s, selected Collins for the prize.
“He’s intelligent, wonderfully witty and urbane, just as the critics say,” McNair said. “But the Billy
Collins who engages me most is the naif – the poet of the curious imagination, who shows us that the
world is a source of delight and mystery, and the only reason we haven’t seen this is that we’ve been
standing in the light.”
The Hall-Kenyon prize honors the married poets who wrote together for nearly 20 years at Hall’s
farm in Wilmot. Kenyon died in 1995. Hall lives and writes in the farmhouse and is expected to attend
this year’s presentation.
“Billy Collins writes moving and beautiful poems, which are often funny as hell,” Hall said. “He is the
best-selling poet of his generation, possibly of many generations.”
Previous winners of the Hall-Kenyon award were Ted Kooser (2010), Kay Ryan (2011) and Jane
Hirshfield (2012).
The prize is co-sponsored by the Concord Monitor and the New Hampshire Writers’ Project through a
fund originally established in Kenyon’s memory. Donations may be made to the Donald Hall-Jane
Kenyon prize fund, c/o New Hampshire Writers’ Project, 2500 N. River Road, Manchester 03196.
Collins’s reading is scheduled at the Concord City Auditorium on Oct. 3. Time and ticket information
will be announced soon.
http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/229741441.html STAR TRIBUNE
Poet Billy Collins is in town to read from his new
book


Article by: KIM ODE , Star Tribune Updated: October 29, 2013 ‐ 3:57 PM Poet Billy Collins, who reads at the Pantages Theatre on Friday, likes leaving
listeners mildly disoriented.
hide Poet Billy Collins
Photo: Gino Domenico, Associated Press
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
 0 Billy Collins likes finding poems where he least expects them.
St. Paul’s Sidewalk Poetry Project, in which people vie to have their words cast in concrete, is one example.
So was his idea for Delta Air Lines’ poetry option among their audio channels — a program he considers among his
three most important contributions while U.S. poet laureate from 2001 to 2003. (The channel ended after a few
years — the clamor for Classic Rock apparently unceasing — but Collins made his point. )
Even humdrum Metrocards for New York City’s subways became vehicles for verse earlier this year when they
carried a short poem Collins wrote for the centennial of Grand Central Terminal.
Such efforts enable people to encounter poetry on something other than the radio, said Collins, who will read his
poems Friday at the Pantages Theatre in Minneapolis. Not that he has anything against radio, far from it.
“Poems are good for the radio, and no one knows that better thanGarrison Keillor,” he said, noting the 20-year run of
“The Writer’s Almanac,” on American Public Media. Collins pinch hit for Keillor this summer — an experience he
enjoyed once he got Keillor’s voice out of his head.
“The first time I was in the studio, I began by saying, ‘Here is “The Writer’s Almanac” for Tuesday, June …’ and I
stopped. It was ridiculous. I felt like I was doing a bad imitation of him. I was pretty insecure. I didn’t want to screw it
up.”
Collins chose each poem during his stint, which meant that most reflected his tastes, which run to “the relatively
quirky, I would say. A little more slanted, peculiar, sometimes jokey, sometimes a poem that would leave you not
uncomprehending but leave you scratching your head at it.
“I tend to like poems that are mildly disorienting.”
Calling on shared experience
Consider “The Country,” which opens his new book, “Aimless Love,” (Random House, $26), his first volume of new
and selected poetry in 12 years.
The poem begins with a friend’s insistence on keeping strike-anywhere matches tightly sealed in his house
“because the mice might get into them and start a fire.” Now unable to sleep, Collins imagines “one unlikely mouse”
with a match in his teeth, rounding a corner, “the blue tip scratching against a rough-hewn beam.”
Who could fail to notice, / lit up in the blazing insulation, / the tiny looks of wonderment on the faces / of his fellow
mice, one-time inhabitants / of what once was your house in the country?”
Disorienting, mildly, and yet rooted in ordinary life. That’s one of Collins’ hallmarks, a way of striking a common
chord in a way that enables poetry to be less in need of a plaintive cheering section.
“I think poetry is coming in from the wilderness, in toward the suburbs, although it’s not going to reclaim the center of
our culture since that’s already been taken by television and other electronic means,” Collins said. “But I think it’s
inching back toward more legitimacy in American culture. I think people are less afraid about it, less shy, less —
what’s that image? — less dilettantish, like chess or something.
“People use the language of shared experiences — opening a can of soup or taking a dog for walk, accessing very
bedrock emotions about being human, the need for love.”
The language of common experience is partly what lifts the book’s last poem, “The Names,” a commission as
laureate to honor those who died in the Sept. 11 attacks.
That the poem is here is something of a surprise, given that Collins once said he would never include it in a
collection, lest it be perceived as capitalizing on the tragedy in any way. He read it before Congress and only rarely
since.
“I didn’t want to just treat it like another Billy Collins poem,” he said. “It was an honor to be asked to write it, and so
specific to that terrible event that I didn’t want to toss it into a bunch of other poems.”
Yet, at 72, Collins realized that “Aimless Love” may be his last book of “new and selected” poems, citing an informal
rule of thumb that it takes four books or a dozen years to accumulate enough from which to make selections.
Also, he added, people keep asking for “The Names.” “And you can find it online, so it’s no secret,” he said. “It was
now or never.”
“The Names” is the second of his most important contributions as laureate. The third is Poetry 180, a program that
encourages high school students to read one poem every day of the school year.
Just one, perhaps Collins’ “Cheerios,” which begins:
One bright morning in a restaurant in Chicago / as I waited for my eggs and toast / I opened the Tribune only to
discover / that I was the same age as Cheerios.
And you keep reading.
Kim Ode • 612-673-7185

Billy Collins
Ben Baker

Billy Collins
When: 8 p.m. Fri.
Where: Pantages Theatre, 710 Hennepin Av. S., Mpls.
Tickets $30.50-$40.50;www.hennepin theatretrust.org
U~T San Diego
By John Wilkens (/staff/john-wilkens/)
6 a.m.
Feb. 24, 2013
Former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins is in town Tuesday night to headline the annual writer’s symposium at P
University.
Born in 1941, he’s the author of more than a dozen books of poetry and was once dubbed “the most popular p
The New York Times. The late writer John Updike called Collins’ poems “gently and consistently startling, more
seem.”
He was the same way in a recent interview.
Q: In this year 2013, why does poetry still matter?
A: Might as well start with the big one, eh? Knock me over right from the start? Like any art form, it doesn’t real
everybody. Very few things do. But poetry is incontestably the only history we have of human emotion. It’s the h
heart.
I think one reason why people turn to poetry in times of crisis, like post 9/11, or why they turn to poetry in mom
occasion, like a wedding or a funeral, is that a poem often tends to connect them to the history of emotion. So
having the emotion; you are part of a big emotional reverberation that’s going through history. Poetry is sort of a
reverberation.
Q: Is that why you write it?
A: No. (He laughed.) I don’t have such high-sounding motives for writing. Frankly, I write because it’s a habitua
thing. It’s deeply satisfying to move into a kind of focused state, into a verbal zone. The other pleasure is that I
where I’m going and so it’s the pleasure of discovery.
Q: How does the process of writing work for you?
A: I’ve never really sat down and willed a poem forth. I’ve never sat down and said, “Look, Collins, you’re going
literature this morning or else.” I have to have a little something to bring to the desk. For me it would be paralyz
a blank page and nothing else.
Someone was talking about the ampersand — you know, that form of punctuation — so last night I just started
poem about the ampersand, criticizing it for being too fancy where just the word “and” could do the job much b
something very trivial like that, often just starting with something simple and then trying to expand it. And the a
pretty short but it sort of ends on a love-poem note. That part was very unexpected.
Q: What you think of the state of poetry these days?
A: When I was poet laureate (2001-03), I was interviewed almost to death because suddenly I was a public figu
frequently asked questions were, number one, how do you account for this incredible renaissance of poetry in
readings and MFA programs and grants? And the second one was, how come nobody reads poetry any more?
There was a way to answer these two questions satisfactorily. There is a lot of poetry activity, a lot of open-mic
magazines. But most of the people who attend these activities are poets themselves, so it’s sort of a closed sys
things I’m glad I’m doing, although I didn’t set out to do it, is kind of expanding the circle beyond poets themse
Q: You’ve been called the most popular poet in America and I’m wondering what kind of a blessing that’s been
curse.
A: Someone’s got to do it. It might as well be me. I’m an only child so I can take all the attention you can throw
You know, it’s one of those titles that draws a lot of resentment, I’m sure. I think if someone else were named th
in America and people kept echoing it I’d start to resent the person somewhat. I don’t know. I have healthy boo
The New York Times was measuring.
Q: I suspect it has something to do with your accessibility as a poet, too.
A: I try to let the reader into the poem in the first few lines. I don’t want the whole poem to be as accessible as
think of accessibility as what in chess you would call a gambit. It’s an opening strategy so the reader can step
and find him or herself on sort of familiar ground. As the poem continues, I want the ground under the reader t
certain degree as we move into a little vaguer territory.
Q: I wanted to ask you about something else that a critic has said about your work, that your poetry “helps us f
being alive.” Is that part of what you’re trying to accomplish?
A: I don’t want to sound too unintentional about all this. I do sort of try to write one poem at a time. But I try to m
kind of present experience for the reader. I don’t want the poem to sound like a recollection of something that h
ago that I just wound up writing about.
I think many of the poems have expressed this theme of a gratitude about being alive that is the result of payin
poem will begin with a very clear observation of something in nature. Right now, I’m looking at the garbageman
garbage and throwing it into the truck and there he is. You know, if you notice what’s going on around you inte
to appreciation of the fact that you are actually here, that you’re actually here to experience it. One of the deep
and I’m echoing it, is just a gratitude for having experience. For being an experiencer.
Q: When you do an event like the coming up here, what do you get out of it?
A: Just saying the poems. Most are poems I’ve read before. I’m just pleased to see they are going over well. I th
like to do is mix the tone of the reading between kind of comic, humorous poems and darker, more serious poe
mortality. I try to mix them in such a way that the audience experiences a kind of pleasant confusion — so that
thinking the reading was both funny and sad.
Q: What’s the most interesting question you’ve been asked at one of your readings?
A: When I was poet laureate, this was a very hard time in American political life because it was the run up to th
first President Bush was not very popular. One question I got at a prep school from a young kid, I guess about
he said, If I was the poet laureate, how many people would have to die before I could become president?
I assured him that I was not in the line of succession for the presidency but if I were, probably about 250 peopl
It was very touching because I think at some level he thought I’d maybe do a better job than the president was
Q: Well, maybe he was right.
A: Maybe. But let’s not get too deeply into that.
© Copyright 2013 The San Diego Union-Tribune, LLC. An MLIM LLC Company. All rights reserved.
News Alert: American Phenomenon Billy Collins Visits LC
Poet Billy Collins, a former U.S. poet laureate whose high critical acclaim and broad appeal have earned him the moniker “American phenomenon,” visited campus on Thursday, as the Loomis Chaffee English Colloquium speaker. Mr. Collins began by reading three thought‐provoking and humorous poems. The first, “Schoolsville,” depicts a teacher reflecting on his career in an imaginary town that is populated by past students who “zigzag” through the streets with their books while the teacher lives alone in his white colonial on Maple and Main “lecturing the wallpaper, quizzing the chandelier, reprimanding air.” The second poem, “Litany,” parodies the literary convention used by male poets in love poems comparing women to beautiful objects. “The Lanyard,” the third poem Mr. Collins read, describes a braided lanyard that the speaker made in summer camp as a gift for his mother, in humorous juxtaposition with the gifts of life, love, and wisdom that the mother has bestowed on her son. After the reading, Head of the English Department Scott Purdy joined Mr. Collins on stage and interviewed the poet about his craft, offering insight for the attentive crowd. “When I write poetry, I try to approach it at an angle through a side door, where something small, like a lanyard, leads to the examination of a daunting subject, such as being indebted to your parents,” Mr. Collins said. “There is a thrilling curiosity in poetry where I have no idea where the poem is going or what is going to happen. I try to use something that is a part of everyday life to make it relatable and use it as a keyhole which gives way to a larger topic, and that’s the power of poetry.” Mr. Collins discussed the persona that he has created as the speaking voice within his poetry. “My persona is the modernization of the romantic wanderer of the landscape — he is not very active but takes things in and then reacts to them. The speaker is always my speaker but is not identical to me. Anyone can read a number of my poems or books and walk away knowing very little about me,” he said. “The persona is in a moment and not burdening the reader with an autobiographical U‐Haul trailer.” Mr. Collins also talked about the influence of past poets on his writing. “You learn to write by reading, and writers are really just readers who have been moved to emulation — the page on which you write is always lit by candles of the past,” he said. “Every time I write, I imagine that I am always in good company of poets who have existed before me, and the goal in my poetry is to take a reader from a familiar place to something completely unfamiliar — like traveling from Kansas to Oz.” Before concluding the convocation with a reading of his poem “Cheerios,” Mr. Collins offered general advice to the aspiring student writers in the crowd. “I don’t think that writing is so much of a calling. I love John Updike’s line: ‘It was like being swallowed by a hobby’ … and Patrick Kavanagh: ‘I began fooling around with words, and it became my life.’ If you love language, love writing, and love looking up words in the dictionary, then the art will eventually swallow you, and you will become a writer.” After the convocation, the poet talked with an eager group of students and faculty in the Burton Room and had lunch with members of the faculty and staff. Mr. Collins, a Guggenheim fellow and a New York Public Library Literary Lion, has published eight collections of poetry, including Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning, Picnic, Lightning, Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes, Sailing Alone Around the Room: New & Selected Poems, Nine Horses, The Trouble With Poetry and Other Poems, Ballistics, and most recently Horoscopes of the Dead. His recent book, Aimless Love: Poems 2003–2013, released this spring, combines 50 new poems and selections from four previous books. Mr. Collins’ work also has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The American Scholar, and other periodicals. Mr. Collins was U.S. poet laureate from 2001 to 2003, and he was selected as New York state poet laureate from 2004 to 2006. In October 2004, Mr. Collins was chosen as the inaugural recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Mark Twain Prize for Humor in Poetry. He has received many additional honors, including fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He also has been awarded the Oscar Blumenthal Prize, the Bess Hokin Prize, the Frederick Bock Prize, and the Levinson Prize — all presented by Poetry magazine. A distinguished professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York, Mr. Collins also is a senior distinguished fellow of the Winter Park Institute at Rollins College. Mr. Collins’ visit to Loomis Chaffee was made possible by English Colloquium, the Hubbard Speakers Series, and the Ralph M. Shulansky '45 Lecture Fund. HOME / CLASSIC POEMS : WHAT MAKES THEM GREAT.
A 19th-century poem about a staring contest between a man and a
fish.
By Billy Collins | Posted Tuesday, March 13, 2012, at 3:30 PM ET
The first time I read Leigh Hunt's “The Fish, the
Man, and the Spirit”—I must have been in
college—I remember doing a double-take. A poem
involving a crabby dialogue between a fish and a
man stood out radically from the field of English
Romantic poetry I was reading then, wherein a
man immersed in a landscape typically falls into a
quiet meditation. Although the structure of Hunt’s
poem is conventional—with its three linked Italian
sonnets following the three-part structure of the
Leigh Hunt
Painting by Benjamin Robert Haydon/Courtesy the
classical syllogism or the turning dance of Greek
National Portrait Gallery, London: NPG 293.
drama—the poem still seems as oddly original to
me now as it did then. The switches in point of
view may seem familiar to us fans of Akira
Kurosawa's Rashomon who have been schooled in relativity, but what could have prepared a
reader of the 1830s for this poem involving a staring contest between a man and a fish? I’m
not aware of any prior poem in which a fish has much of anything to say. Adding to the poem’s
innovative nature is the double morphing of fish into man then fish-man into spirit. And the
comic play of the poem is zany enough to remind us more of animal fables than the great
Romantic lyric, which took its sponsorship of the natural world very seriously.
The fun of the poem—and fun is the mood until the party’s over-sobriety of the final section
—lies, as it should, in the playfulness of its language. The first sonnet is given over to man’s
condescending view of what he regards as the lower species of fish. The man might be serious
in his convictions, but we are mostly entertained by his exaggerated tropes (“astonishedlooking … gaping wretches”) and the folly that leads him to choose goggles as a rhyme word
then follow it with joggles, and ingeniously find a way out of the corner with boggles. And, of
course, his homocentric arrogance is on comic display. He even thinks that fish should know
what day of the week it is. (“How pass your Sundays?”) The game does a flip when the
surprisingly articulate fish replies with equal wit, giving as good as it has gotten, and forces us
to see ourselves as the real aliens. The Great Chain of Being is turned upside-down, and
humans become bizarre creatures who walk “prong after prong” in their “split” bodies,
breathing “sword-sharp air.” From this ichthyo-centric perspective, hand-holding humans are
seen as “linked fin by fin! most odiously.” The appalled fish exposes the man to an odd,
objective view of himself, quickly unsettling his (and even our) sense of primacy.
Advertisement
As we step to the next sonnet, the poem transports us from one realm of life on
Bazelon: T
Behavior
Zimmerm
Attorneys
Boys Pus
Newfangl
—Sweden
for Gende
Walking
Earth to another, from the world of air-breathing to aquatic beings, and gives us the other side
of this philosophical debate between surf and turf. Each side sees the other as freakish and
hideous, a cause not for wonderment, but for distrust and disparagement. The man and fish
face off in a put-down contest, an inter-species bout of the dozens. Hostility seems the only
available accompaniment to their disbelief in the possibility of the other, the fish gulping
salt-water, the man, a breather of the unbreathable. Just listen to the trash talk: wretches,
unloving, vile days, monster, horribly, disgracer, dreary sloth. Is there a lesson here in how
the Other is naturally regarded with suspicion and hostility? Only with the appearance of the
Spirit does the mutual estrangement cease as the resolving power of the final sonnet
concludes the poem.
Hunt ends the poem with the now presiding voice of the Spirit who, after having subsumed the
fish and man, blithely lifts us above their bickering to a height from which we can hear the
music of the spheres. Taking full advantage of the sonnet structure, the Spirit gives over its
octave to a calm denunciation of the hate and pride that has driven the fish-man debate and
then replaces hierarchical thinking with equality—nothing beneath nor above. The beautiful,
peace-making sestet divides its lines equally between man and fish, man aspiring heavenward
toward the angelic, the fish sweet and silver, perfectly fitted to its realm, quick with fear. It’s a
nice touch that the lowly fish gets to finish this most unusual poem.
CARTO
Click the arrow on the audio player below to hear Billy Collins read Leigh Hunts "The Fish, the
Man, and the Spirit.” You can also download the recording or subscribe to Slate's Poetry
Podcast on iTunes.
“The Fish, the Man, and the Spirit”
To a Fish
You strange, astonished-looking, angle-faced,
Dreary-mouthed, gaping wretches of the sea,
Gulping salt-water everlastingly,
Cold-blooded, though with red your blood be graced,
And mute, though dwellers in the roaring waste;
And you, all shapes beside, that fishy be—
Some round, some flat, some long, all devilry,
Legless, unloving, infamously chaste—
O scaly, slippery, wet, swift, staring wights,
What is’t ye do? what life lead? eh, dull goggles?
How do ye vary your vile days and nights?
How pass your Sundays? Are ye still but joggles
In ceaseless wash? Still nought but gapes, and bites,
And drinks, and stares, diversified with boggles?
A Fish Answers
Amazing monster! that, for aught I know,
With the first sight of thee didst make our race
Forever stare! Oh flat and shocking face,
Grimly divided from the breast below!
Thou that on dry land horribly dost go
With a split body and most ridiculous pace,
Prong after prong, disgracer of all grace,
B
Y
G
o
K
Long-useless-finned, haired, upright, unwet, slow!
Q
O breather of unbreathable, sword-sharp air,
How canst exist? How bear thyself, thou dry
And dreary sloth? What particle canst share
Of the only blessed life, the watery?
I sometimes see of ye an actual pair
Go by! linked fin by fin! most odiously.
The Fish Turns Into a Man, and Then
Into a Spirit, and Again Speaks
Indulge thy smiling scorn, if smiling still,
O man! and loathe, but with a sort of love;
For difference must its use by difference prove,
And, in sweet clang, the spheres with music fill.
One of the spirits am I, that at his will
Live in whate’er has life—fish, eagle, dove—
No hate, no pride, beneath nought, nor above,
A visitor of the rounds of God’s sweet skill.
Man’s life is warm, glad, sad, ’twixt loves and graves,
Boundless in hope, honored with pangs austere,
Heaven-gazing; and his angel-wings he craves:
The fish is swift, small-needing, vague yet clear,
A cold, sweet, silver life, wrapped in round waves,
Quickened with touches of transporting fear.
Guest columnist Billy Collins and Slate poetry editor Robert Pinsky will be joining in the
discussion of Leigh Hunts poem this week. Post your questions and comments on the
work, and they'll respond and participate. For Slate's poetry submission guidelines,
click here. Click here to visit Robert Pinsky's Favorite Poem Project site. Click here for an
archive of discussions about poems with Robert Pinsky in "the Fray," Slate's reader forum.
Tweet
Bi l l y Col l i ns's ni nth col l ecti on of poems, Horoscopes for the Dead, wi l l be
publ i shed i n March. He i s a di sti ngui shed professor of Engli sh at Lehman Col l ege
(CUNY) and a di sti ngui shed fel l ow of the Wi nter Park Insti tute of Rol l i ns Col l ege.
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Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins Captures Comedic Culture | The...
1 of 2
http://www.emorywheel.com/detail-pf.php?n=30589
By Arianna Skibell
Posted: 01/31/2012
In my senior year of high school, my English teacher asked us to choose
a poet who we admired and to write a report about him or her. A lover of
prose and a skeptic towards poetry, I chose the first poet I could think
of: Sylvia Plath. After about 20 minutes, I was seized by the
overwhelming desire to stick my head in an oven, and promptly began
looking for another poet.
After searching, I found Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins, whose
poem entitled “Marginalia,” describes, in stunning accuracy and wit, the
tendency people have to write in the margins of books, and more
specifically, the different types of notes — whether astonished remarks
or stances of indignation — people write.
In this poem, Collins gives life to a practice that is overlooked, and if not
overlooked, then certainly not considered substantial enough to merit a
poem.
When I read the final lines of this poem, which detail a young girl’s
marginal comments in J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, saying
“Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love,” I knew I had found a poet
whose work I could relate to.
Courtesy of Emory Photo/Video
Billy Collins (above), former U.S. poet laureate, discussed
the creative process with Kevin Young, professor of creative
writing and english, and Rosemary Magee, vice president
and secretary of the University.
Collins is the rare man who can write a narrative from a dead dog’s
perspective and still get a laugh, who can describe a singing squirrel and evoke nostalgia for something you’ve never had, who can
capture the essence of a poet’s lifestyle through wit and the use of a reoccurring window motif.
And he does it all with an unerring accessibility that will simultaneously delight a child and move an adult to unbridled introspection.
Collins graced Glenn Memorial Auditorium last Sunday with his poetry. The reading was a part of the Raymond Danowski Poetry
Library Reading Series, which has brought to campus esteemed poets such as Mary Oliver, Robert Pinsky, Elizabeth Alexander, Rita
Dove, Sonia Sanchez and Lucille Clifton, according to the press release.
Collins also participated in a Creativity Conference in Cannon Chapel yesterday with Atticus Haygood Professor of English and
Creative Writing Kevin Young and University Vice-President & Secretary Rosemary Magee. During the conference, Collins shed light
on his idea of what it takes to be a poet. He stressed the fact that you cannot simply write poetry to be a poet. You must also read
poetry.
“Poetry is inspired by poetry,” he said. “Your voice as a poet has an external source.”
Without an array of influences, an aspiring writer cannot truly learn to write poetry, he said. Therefore, it is essential for the writer to
draw on the styles of many poets in his or her own work until it is impossible to trace the poem back to the source.
“Like a good soup,” Collins said, “[in which] the ingredients have been ingeniously blended.”
When writing his own poems, Collins starts small.
“It’s always good to start with something very small and undeniable,” he said in an interview with the Wheel after the Creativity
Conversation. “I try not to come in with an agenda. But then I want to go somewhere. I want to take the reader to an interesting place
that might even be a little disorienting or bizarre.”
The wonderfully bizarre nature of many of Collins’s poems was not lost on Sunday’s audience. Interim director of the Manuscript,
Archives and Rare Book Library and director of Library External Affairs Ginger Smith introduced Young, who spoke a little about
Collins’s work, before introducing the acclaimed poet.
“He is a poet who is incredibly intimate,” Young said. “Collins suggests poetry is a living thing.”
Collins’s cleverness, which I had grown to expect, was abundant and proved a central through-line during Sunday’s reading. Collins
read 25 of his poems, from various collections, to a full house.
He opened by sharing an amusing anecdote from a reading he gave in Texas. Collins explained that the chair of the English
department expressed surprise at the large number of people in attendance, to which Collins promptly responded by expressing his
2/29/2012 12:07 PM
Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins Captures Comedic Culture | The...
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http://www.emorywheel.com/detail-pf.php?n=30589
own surprise that 20 million people watch American Idol.
The first poem Collins read, “You, Reader,” detailed an imagined relationship between a salt and a pepper shaker. He wonders if the
two are friends after all the time they’ve spent as a duo, or if they are still strangers like “you and I.” In this way, Collins uses everyday,
seemingly mundane objects to comment on the strange connection a poet has to his readers and vice versa.
In another poem, entitled “The Suggestion Box,” Collins colorfully portrays a day in the life of a poet. The poem begins with the
speaker sitting in a diner.
A waitress approaches to take his order, saying, “I bet you’re going to write a poem about this,” after spilling a coffee in his lap.
Throughout the poem, many individuals offer advice about poem topics.
“Why is everyone being so helpful, I think,” Collins read to an uproar of laughter.
Collins’s humor takes a dark, yet undeniably comic, turn in his poem, “Hangover.” He muses, while sitting in a motel listening to
children play Marco Polo in the pool, what he would do if crowned emperor: “Every child who is playing Marco Polo,” he began,
“would be required to read a biography of Marco Polo — a long one with fine print — as well as a history of China and of Venice, the
birthplace of the venerated explorer Marco Polo.”
The poem concludes with the speaker’s ultimate goal: “each child would be quizzed by me then executed by drowning.”
Although Collins’s wit is sharp and his wording colloquial, his true genius lies in his active imagination. One of Collins’s most
memorable poems from the reading was written in response to French poet Paul Valéry’s comment, “A poem is never finished, only
abandoned.”
He begins by describing a winter day in January: “I would see the poems of Valéry, the ones he never finished but abandoned,
wandering the streets of the city half clothed.” He personifies one poem in particular, describing her as “beautiful, emaciated,
unfinished.”
Collins’s final jab at Valéry’s notion of an abandoned poem is to do what Valéry could not: “Never mind the holding and the pressing,”
he said. “It is enough to know that I moved my pen in such a way as to bring her to completion.”
— Contact Arianna Skibell.
2/29/2012 12:07 PM
Billy Collins: Verse forward, poetry backward | The Salt Lake Tribune
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BY BEN FULTON
The Salt Lake Tribune
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The New York Times labels Billy Collins as "the most popular poet in
America." Poetry fans, ever sensitive to overstatement, know Collins as
perhaps the most charming writer to ever grace verse.
Whether or not you care for Collins’ breezy way with poetry, often parodied
but never equaled, there’s no denying his versatility. His best-selling 2001
collection, Sailing Alone Around the Room, bridges the poetic divide between
literary devices, ranging from poems such as "The Death of Allegory," an erotic
underwear catalog in "Victoria’s Secret," and cooking to jazz music, "I Chop
Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey’s Version of ‘Three Blind Mice.’ "
As U.S. poet laureate from 2001 to 2003, Collins wrote "The Names," one of
the first known poems in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He’ll read that
poem in a recorded broadcast for PBS, days before taking a plane to Utah,
where he’ll speak Sept. 8 at Snow College in Ephraim. He took his phone
interview from Washington, D.C.
Poet Billy Collins
No, I’m just quick to correct them on the comparison. Compared to Frost, my
poetry is like a bed that hasn’t been made in six months. Frost was a genius in
observing the rules of formal poetry — rhyme and meter — and yet made his
poems seem as natural as a song. I can’t do that. I sound natural, but I follow a
much less restrictive set of rules. The only point of comparison, really, is that
we both sold a lot of books in our time.
When » Sept. 8, 12:30 p.m.
convocation program and 7
p.m. lecture
Did your view of poetry’s place in the public sphere change after your
tenure as U.S. Poet Laureate?
Where » Eccles Center for
Performing Arts on Snow
College campus, 300 N.
Center St., Ephraim
Info » Free. Call
T
Utes
P
BYU
Email:
First published Aug 31 2011 03:31PM
Updated Sep 2, 2011 01:00PM
Do you blush when people compare you to Robert Frost?
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I never had great hopes for some kind of explosive change in the poetryreading population of America. It’s gotten smaller since the 19th century
because of competition from other media. Also, people’s absence from poetry
is based almost completely on how poetry was presented to them in school.
9/7/2011 11:42 AM
As Mr. Collins Said, With a Modest Chuckle - 8/2/11 - Vineyard Gazette ...
1 of 3
http://www.mvgazette.com/article.php?31301
Archived Edition: Tuesday, August 2, 2011
By TATIANA SCHLOSSBERG
The poem begins with the routine event of
chopping parsley, a serious and yet absurd
musing on a nursery rhyme known to all —
three blind mice — and quickly spins into a
quiet meditation on the sneaking cynicism
that prevents us from feeling, and then, in
shame, makes us feel all the more.
It is Billy Collins’s poem, I Chop Some
Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey’s
Version of Three Blind Mice, that forces
this revelation. And more of this slicing
self-awareness was on display as he spoke
from a sunlit living room at the Point Way
Inn in Edgartown.
Mr. Collins had arrived on the Island, as he
does every two years or so, to do a reading
as part of the Summer Poetry Series at
Featherstone Center for the Arts. “They
seem to have me up here every two years,
which is just enough time for them to
forget me, and then they have me back as a
reminder. The pressure is on for me to
Poet Billy Collins: Rhyme and Meter are stabilizing forces.
come up with a poem every two years for
the people on Martha’s Vineyard,” he said, the day before his reading was to take
place.
Despite our forgetfulness, he finds that the Vineyard boasts an especially receptive
audience: “It’s an intelligent, well-read audience, and since I’m so intelligent and
well-read, we get along.
“Well,” he added, “you know, that’s going to sound really bad in your article. After
every quote, you should add, ‘He said with a modest chuckle,’ or, ‘He said
handsomely,’” he said handsomely, with a modest chuckle.
He is modest, or at least self-deprecating, almost to a fault. For a man who has written
13 poetry collections, edited three anthologies of poetry, served as Poet Laureate of the
8/8/2011 2:24 PM
As Mr. Collins Said, With a Modest Chuckle - 8/2/11 - Vineyard Gazette ...
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United States, and of whose poems John Updike wrote, “They describe all the worlds
that are and were and some others besides,” modesty might come as a surprise.
But that would be misconception on the reader’s part, Mr. Collins said.
“The reader mistakes the author sitting there with another person who wrote all the
works. The author doesn’t think of himself as having written all those works. He thinks
of himself as a person who’s trying to figure out what to write next.
“I’m not the sum of what I’ve written,” he said. That mentality, which may seem a
disappointment to the reader, is how the artist fosters the continuous compulsion to
create.
“I have a complete lack of affection for whatever I’ve written,” Mr. Collins said. “If I
look back at my work, I don’t remember writing the poems I read. I don’t remember
where I was, or what I was feeling. I have very little control over those feelings. The
only thing I think is, How did I do that? I’ll never be able to do that again. Where is
that poet now? Where has he fled?”
Mr. Collins seems to be able to keep tracking him down, that elusive poet, turning that
anxiety into work that is cherished by a national audience.
While many writers lament the lack of interest in contemporary poetry, Mr. Collins
remains unconstrained by that pessimism.
“Poetry is not really for everybody, and I’m not disturbed that everyone doesn’t read
poetry,” he said. “Selfishly, I’m surprised that a large number of people read my
poetry. It distracts me from the small number of people reading American poetry.”
Much of his ability to reach a broad audience comes from a balance of the scholarly
and the pragmatic. In this balance lies his understanding of how to communicate a
feeling that extends beyond his own immediate experience.
“Poetry does offer the opportunity of getting readers and strangers interested in and
captivated by your internal life,” he said. “And the way to do that is through the
imposition of form. That becomes literary pleasure — if you give me literary pleasure,
I’ll be interested in that fishing trip you took with your uncle 10 years ago. Otherwise,
I’m not that engrossed by it.”
Of course, there are times when poetry is inescapably engrossing; when it is the only
form that seems to hold all the answers, perfectly capturing how we feel; when it can
connect us to our immediate surroundings and ages long since past.
“Poetry connects us with a historical community of feeling,” Mr. Collins said. “You can
read a poem by Dylan Thomas that matches exactly how you feel, or a 17th century
English poem and feel the same way. It reminds us that we aren’t alone. It connects us
to the bedrock of being human, reiterating that basic spectrum of human emotion.”
The natural world often serves as the basis of this connection, of one age to another.
Whether delicate wonderment at the natural world, or complete submergence in its
vast power, nature’s images, sounds and smells last.
8/8/2011 2:24 PM
As Mr. Collins Said, With a Modest Chuckle - 8/2/11 - Vineyard Gazette ...
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“In the poem Dover Beach, Matthew Arnold is listening to the water of the English
Channel, and he says, ‘Sophocles long ago / Heard it on the Aegean.’
“If you stand on the shore of Martha’s Vineyard, that sound of water lapping, Joan of
Arc and Benjamin Franklin, they heard that too. Those are the natural sounds that
bind us together,” Mr. Collins said. “That’s probably why poetry has always relied on
natural imagery to tie us to together.”
For him, this service poetry provides was made especially evident during his time as
Poet Laureate.
“I was made Poet Laureate right before 9/11 — and the spotlight then was even more
glaring, because people turned to poetry in that time. In times of great emotional
stress, poetry formalizes a moment of great emotional intensity.
“Rhyme and meter,” he said, “those are stabilizing forces. ”
Even that honor and duty — to raise the consciousness of a nation to the higher calling
of verse, to comfort them with rhyme and meter — is a source of self-deprecation for
Mr. Collins.
“The laureateship here goes so fast,” he said. “It’s always a mad scramble to find
someone. I always think, if you’re a fairly decent poet and you stay healthy and take
your vitamins, you’ll be Poet Laureate. And the one thing you’ll learn is how to make
the term plural: It’s Poets Laureate.”
But poetry itself teaches other lessons. As the oldest recorded form of storytelling,
spanning from Homer to Kanye West, it is central to the human story. “You can carry a
poem in your head, and well, I guess you can carry a tune in your head, but if you have
a bad voice, no one is going to want to hear it. You can’t carry a painting or a building
in your head.
“As a historical note, that accounts for why the Irish are so attached to poetry,” Mr.
Collins explained. “It’s not because they have the gift of the gab, but for 600 years,
poetry was all they had. They didn’t have concerts or opera, and no architecture to
speak of, except some cottages, and no tradition of painting. There was no renaissance
in Ireland, and that’s because of the British. But they realized that with poetry, no one
can take it away from you.”
And, in his experience, both as a poet and a teacher of poetry, it never leaves.
“A few years ago, I had an old student of mine come up to me on the subway. He had
become an oncologist, and he came and sat next to me and recited an Emily Dickinson
poem that he’d memorized 15 years earlier.
“And, just like that, the crowning moment of my teaching career took place on a
subway train,” he said, with a handsome, modest and lyrical laugh.
© 2011 Vineyard Gazette
8/8/2011 2:24 PM
Royce Hall: Poetry takes flight with Kay Ryan and Billy Collins at Royce...
3 of 5
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-guidefeature21-201104...
have a severe distaste for pretentiousness in poetry or other literary endeavors."
As U.S. poet laureate, Collins, who served from 2001 to 2003, and Ryan, who served from 2008 to
2010, each used the appointment to raise awareness of poetry in schools: Collins in high schools and
Ryan in community colleges.
Though their lives contain parallels, in terms of their poetry, Ryan said, "I don't think we're very
similar at all, except we both really love to make an audience laugh. When we're performing, we both
really, really want the audience to have a good time and to speak to us in laughter."
Gasla
Stinga
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Carol Muske-Dukes, a professor at USC and the current California poet laureate, said both poets
seduce readers with their wit, charm and accessible language.
"The difficulty of the craft and the extreme expertise and vision of those poems," she said, "is hidden
by the illusion of ease."
Collins and Ryan, who have read together on many occasions, share a kind of playful antagonism. "We
enjoy making fun of each other in a very good spirit," Collins said. "And I, of course, admire her poems
tremendously."
Ryan's poems are sharp and tight, and their austere forms disguise their depth. In "A Ball Rolls on a
Point," a single sphere rolling along invokes the weight of the world: "The whole ball / of who we are /
presses into / the green baize / at a single tiny / spot."
What
Where
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Readers' Re
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As Collins said, "Her poems embody probably more than any living poet an attribute that tends to
distinguish poetry from all other forms, and that is compression. Her poems are incredibly compact.
I'm not just talking about shortness — there's a kind of density of meaning and particularly a density of
sound."
That density of sound makes her poems well-suited to reading aloud, and Ryan treats her readings as
performances. "I also use the bass pedal on my rhymes sometimes when I'm reading aloud," she said,
referring to her sometimes heavy stress on certain words, "so that I really emphasize them for the
sheer fun of getting people to hear it."
'Harry Po
trailer: Da
Ministry of
Grauman
producers
04/28/2011
Cirque du
'Iris' at Ko
1:15 p.m.
But Ryan also warned that her entertaining presentations can belie the uncomfortable content at the
core of her poems. In an interview in the Paris Review, she compared her poems to fairy gifts that
would later change and become frightening.
When asked what she admired about Collins' work, Ryan cited the transformation of the familiar: "In
a way, I enjoy what so very many people enjoy, and that is the easy, inviting tone and pace of his work,
where he walks you down a path and the path gets much more interesting and funnier than you knew."
A typical Collins poem begins in an ordinary place but takes the reader elsewhere, somewhere surreal.
In "Another Reason Why I Don't Keep a Gun in the House," the simple act of playing music to drown
out a dog's barking ends with the image of the dog barking along in an orchestra, "while the other
musicians listen in respectful / silence to the famous barking dog solo, that endless coda that first
established / Beethoven as an innovative genius."
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4/28/2011 2:08 PM
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As Muske-Dukes said, "It's making what is familiar new, making what we think we understand, what
we see all the time, new to us."
Whether on the page or read aloud, that subtle shift — when a witty observation envelops an
uncomfortable truth, when a journey leaves a well-known place and ventures somewhere strange — is
where the poet's art resides.
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Kay Ryan and Billy Collins
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Where: Royce Hall, UCLA, 340 Royce Drive, L.A.
Obama bi
service," T
When: 8 p.m. Saturday
Timothy R
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Tickets: $28-$53 general admission, $15 UCLA students
Deadly st
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Info: (310) 825-2101; http://www.uclalive.org
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killing 2 o
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are about as interested in my personal life as I am in theirs—which is to say not very much. But
5.
The Sleeples
a longtime friend of mine, Michael Shannon [the co-founder, with Mr. Collins, of the Mid-Atlantic
Review], passed away a few years ago. Our birthdays were around the same time of the year.
Most Read Articles F
I sometimes read horoscopes. So after he died, I'd read my Aries and shift over to his Pisces.
I like the title in that it conveys a hopeless optimism.
For someone who grew up in Queens, your poems don't feature much urban imagery.
It's not there at all. My persona is semi-rustic or suburban. I spend a lot of time in New York
City, but there's too much going on and I want to create a vacuum where very little is going on
and then a poem arises out of something very small happening.
Do you think your popularity is due to the accessibility of your work?
It's embarrassing to account for one's own popularity. "Miss Kentucky, why do you think you're
so beautiful? Well, my nose for one thing is cute." I've been very fortunate in being connected
Rea
to a wider audience through NPR. It's been extremely critical to what's happened to me.
Do you accept that poetry isn't part of mass culture, or do you fight that perception?
There's this chasm for a reason, and part of the blame lays on the poets who are creating
poetry that is a) willfully obscure and calls on the reader to do a fruitless amount of work, and
b) assumes an interest on the reader's part in the poet's personal suffering. I read poetry
because I want to be linguistically pleasured. As Poet Laureate, I was asked to go out and
beat the drum for poetry. I found that 83% of American poetry isn't worth reading. That's my
figure. The other 17% is hard to live without.
This month's issue of Oprah magazine has poets modeling fashion. Have you ever done
anything silly to promote your poetry?
Baby Dies After Da
An 18-month-old boy
teenaged boyfriend d
coma.
Weather Journal:
Goodbye Sunshine
Those who missed ou
sunlight might be out
squall line is bringing
Tuesday.
Wall Street Trader
Window
Manhattan Rail Ya
I wrote a poem for the 40th anniversary of Golf magazine, for which I was paid a certain
amount of money, negotiated by my agent, and given two Scotty Cameron putters—one for me
and one for my agent. I'm not sure if you know anything about golf, but Scotty Cameron makes
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4/5/2011 8:38 AM
Format Dynamics :: Dell Viewer
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http://www.courier-journal.com/fdcp/?unique=1301336708649
In person, his delivery is droll, and his
timing is perfect, making a Billy Collins
poetry reading aesthetically pleasing and
riotously funny.
Written by
Frederick Smock
Special to The Courier-Journal
8:25 PM, Mar. 25, 2011|
Billy Collins is a rare poet — accessible and
gravid, high-minded and delightful.
He is also, quite possibly, the funniest man
in po-biz.
His poem “Nostalgia,” one of many
possible examples, begins:
Remember the 1340s? We were doing
a dance called the Catapult.
You always wore brown….
Everyone would pause for beer and onions
in the afternoon,
and at night we would play a game called
“Find the Cow.”
In “The Lanyard,” Collins writes about a boy
at summer camp making a present for his
mother, a plastic lanyard, which in the
boy's mind will repay his mother for all that
she has done for him:
A recent New York Times review noted that
Collins writes with “clarity and apparent
ease.”
The interesting word here is “apparent.”
Do not suppose that these poems are easy
to write because they are easy to read. The
good poet hides the hard work; the good
poem only looks effortless.
His poems typically begin anywhere: “The
first thing I heard this morning,” “As I sat on
the sunny side of train #241,” “It was a
drowsy summer afternoon.” At some point
— and this is where we locate his talent —
his poems always veer into magic.
“Roadside Flowers” concludes with these
lines:
wild phlox perhaps,
or at least a cousin of that family,
a pretty one who comes to visit
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She gave me life and milk from her
breasts….
and taught me to walk and swim….
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a
counselor.
3/28/2011 11:26 AM
Format Dynamics :: Dell Viewer
2 of 2
every summer for two weeks without
her parents,
she who unpacks her things upstairs
while I am out on the lawn
throwing the ball as high as I can,
catching it almost
every time in my two outstretched hands.
Collins is a long-time teacher at Lehman
College in New York City, and he finds a
deep connection between poetry and
teaching.
http://www.courier-journal.com/fdcp/?unique=1301336708649
Collins served as poet laureate of the
United States in 2001-2002. Among his
many prizes are the Poetry Foundation's
Mark Twain Award for humor in poetry and
a fellowship from the Guggenheim
Foundation.
Frederick Smock is chairman of the English
department at Bellarmine University. His
newest book of poetry is “The Blue Hour”
(Larkspur Press).
COLLINS IN LOUISVILLE
In a recent essay that appeared in the
Chronicle of Higher Education, Collins
wrote, “I came to realize that to study
poetry was to replicate the way we learn
and think. When we read a poem, we enter
the consciousness of another. It requires
that we loosen some of our fixed notions in
order to accommodate another point of
view — which is a model of the kind of
intellectual openness and conceptual
sympathy that a liberal arts education
seeks to encourage.”
His new collection of poems, “Horoscopes
for the Dead,” is being published in April,
National Poetry Month, and it is vintage Billy
Collins. Humor, he has said, is “a door into
the serious.” Thus do we get new poems
proposing marriage to all three of the
Ikettes; memorizing John Donne; extolling
dogs and thieves and poetry readings —
Poet Billy Collins will be the next guest of the
Kentucky Author Forum on April 21 at the Kentucky
Center for the Performing Arts. He will be
interviewed by humorist Garrison Keillor.
The event in the Bomhard Theater is sold out, but
additional viewing by closed-screen television is
available. Call (502) 584-7777 or (800) 775-7777,
or go to www.kentuckycenter.org.
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The woman who wrote from Phoenix
after my reading there
to tell me they were all still talking about it
just wrote again
to tell me that they had stopped.
3/28/2011 11:26 AM
Library Journal, January 2011
Collins, Billy. Horoscopes for the Dead: Poems. Random. Mar. 2011. c.128p.
ISBN 9781400064922. $24. POETRY
In his ninth book of poems (after Ballistics), Collins recalls a boyhood passion for
collecting: “lantern, spyglass, tomahawk...in the order you would need them in,” a sweet
beginning with ominous implications. And there is a sharp edge to his fabrications in this
volume, which begins with a verbal prank at his parents’ grave, ends with the last poem he
will ever write, and includes a catalog of his unborn children. His Florida is not Paris; his
friend does not have cancer, nor is she human; and the dead don’t do anything that
appears here in their absurd, generic horoscopes (nor would they have even when alive).
In the empty lawn chairs, “no one is resting a glass or placing a book facedown,” and the
most delightful companions are the cemetery dead. As if feeling naughty, the poet
lounges poolside and regards a floating rubber version of himself: “a cool ducky,
nonchalant/ little dude on permanent vacation.” Ultimately, these absorbing games can’t
deny the fundamental calamity: grief seeps between the cracks. VERDICT Witty
bleakness from a former poet laureate and one of the country’s most popular poets.
—Ellen Kaufman, Baruch Coll., New York
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Billy Collins, former poet laureate and this year's NPL Literary Award Winner, talks with Chapter
16 about why we're all born for poetry—and how school kills it for kids
There may be no such thing anymore as a famous poet, but the winner of this year’s Nashville
Public Library Literary Award comes very close. Billy Collins is a frequent guest on National
Public Radio shows like A Prairie Home Companion and Fresh Air, his readings pack even halls
that seat two thousand people or more, and his books sell by the tens of thousands in a
publishing climate where a new book of poems typically sells a few hundred copies.
Collins served as poet laureate of the U.S. in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist
attacks, a time when, thanks to his guidance, many major media outlets quoted poetry more
often than at any time since the nineteenth century. During his two-year stint as poet laureate,
he worked tirelessly to bring home the point that poetry is not an effete art that exists as an
endangered species in the protected cage of university English departments. Collins’s own work
is almost universally referred to as “accessible” (though he prefers the word “hospitable” [4]), and
the major effort of his laureate years, Poetry 180 [5], was an initiative designed to reintroduce
high-school students to the pleasures of poetry, a plan he hoped to accomplish by divorcing
poems from the anxiety-inducing act of enforced interpretation.
The Nashville Public Library has made examples of Collins’s poetry available here [6]. Billy Collins
recently spoke with Chapter 16 by phone from his home in New York.
Chapter 16: You were named poet laureate shortly before 9/11, and, if I remember right, you
were suddenly getting calls from the media—like the NewsHour and Time and Newsweek
—because they wanted you to recommend some poems they could print or read on the air that
would speak to the experience of the attacks. Am I remembering this accurately?
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Collins: Yes. The timing was either perfect of awful, depending on
your point of view. But I was appointed poet laureate just a few months before September 11. I
was pretty much swamped with not just interview requests but, as you said, recommendations
—like, “What should we be reading now?”
It was very revealing, and yet not unfamiliar, that people would turn to poetry and not, for
example, movies or the ballet when in times of national uncertainty. I guess that was the mood of
the country—it was the mood of intense uncertainty—and poetry has always had not just a
consoling aspect to it but a steadying influence on people. I think the reason poetry can be
consoling is that it reminds us that we’re not alone, that whatever emotion we’re experiencing is
really nothing new. It might feel overwhelming to us, but [then we read] a poem written in 1767,
and this person seems to be going through a very similar crisis. So by bringing us into this kind
of community of historical suffering, poetry reminds us that we’re not alone.
But also poetry has formal properties—rhyme and meter, but there are others that are
substitutes for those two—and [those] formal properties have a kind of steadying sound to them.
[Unlike] a short story, a poem has rhythmic comfort. It’s short, sometimes memorizable, and you
can carry it in your purse or your pocket; it’s transferable. So I’m not surprised that people
wanted to read the poems.
And there’s one thing I’ll just add to that. One of the reactions to 9/11 was people saying, “We
were going to get married a year and a half from now but we decided to move it up to next
week.” [Or] “We were going to take our family to Paris in a year, [but] we’re going to do stuff now
because we are reminded that life is not a guarantee.” This is the oldest message in poetry. It’s
called carpe diem. You can’t get out of high school without seeing it on a blackboard at least
once. And anyone who has the slightest interest in poetry knows that that is the crucial message
of poetry. Of course you’re supposed to live for the moment. Of course you're supposed to live
engaged with life more immediately because you are reminded here of your mortality. Poets did
not need a terrorist attack to remind them of their mortality.
"… You're supposed to live engaged with life more immediately because you are
reminded here of your mortality. Poets did not need a terrorist attack to remind them
of their mortality."
Chapter 16: We don’t have in this country the expectation, as the British have, that our poets
laureate should write occasional verse, but you wrote a 9/11 poem yourself—“The Names”
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—and delivered it to a rare joint session of Congress. Do you remember why you did?
Collins: I remember clearly. If the British poet laureate is a member of the royal household, then
the American poet laureate is really an employee of the Library of Congress. And we are not
obliged in any way to write on the events of national importance, but I was responding to a
pressure that was put on me by Congress—and by Congress I mean probably the public
relations office of congress—because they called me and asked me to do that. I initially told
them I didn’t think I’d be able to because that’s not the kind of poetry I write. But eventually I
realized two things: I could use the form of the elegy, and just write about the victims of 9/11, the
fatalities. And also I could use the alphabet and kind of step, as from one stone to the other,
through the alphabet. Reciting a name for each letter, and the alphabet would steady me.
Chapter 16: As poet laureate, you launched the Poetry 180 initiative, in which you urged
schoolteachers to read the poems to students without discussing them or assigning work related
to the readings. I was thinking about that when my fourteen-year-old was at the table last night
griping about poetry. This is a child we thought was almost a poetic savant—always making up
rhymes and playing with language, like singing “Swing Low Sweet Cherry Pie” to the tune of
“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” Any theories about what happened to him?
Collins: How old was he when he was changing “chariot” to “cherry pie”?
Chapter 16: Four, probably, but he was doing that kind of thing right up until last year.
Collins: Well, he seems very typical. He seems to [represent] a pattern of how people’s sense of
poetry develops and then is ruined. I think we’re all natural poets. Children, as you know, love
that kind of stuff. They love chariot and cherry pie. It’s really part of rhyming. Those words don’t
rhyme exactly, but they’re cousin words—they sound similar, right? And to substitute words that
sound similar and usurp the whole meaning of the verse and take it from its religious [meaning]
to nonsense is such a delight because it appeals to the subversive sense of children.
And the other basic pleasure is just rhyme. Children are delighted and astounded to discover at
some point in their life that the thing that they use to eat their cereal with sounds almost exactly
like that big white thing in the sky at night—moon-spoon. It feels good on their lips and it
connects these two wildly different things, and that’s one of the very primal pleasures of poetry.
But there are others, too. So, what’s your son’s name?
Chapter 16: That son’s name is Henry.
Collins: I have such respect for the teachers, who are caught between students and parents
and administrators and test preparation. But what happens is, the teaching of poetry seems to
be weighted very heavily on the side of interpretation. So it might be [that] he just heard this
poem by Edgar Allen Poe, and [the teacher says], “Henry, what do you think that means?” Or,
“What do think that stands for?” It turns into a kind of interrogation, and it associates poetry with
anxiety.
And teachers don’t mean to do it, but there’s only one dominant way to teach, and that’s the
school of interpretation. You can’t very well, at the age of fourteen, sit around the classroom and
talk about cherry pie—it isn’t going to go anywhere as a serious subject, and it’s not preparing
children for the explication that might come up on the test. So boys and girls often have the
natural pleasures of poetry beaten out of them by the time they get out of high school. Two
reasons why: forceful emphasis on interpretation, and using poems that are very dated—poems
that were written a hundred years ago.
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Poetry 180 was meant to alleviate those two things—first, by offering students poems that were
super-contemporary so they could hear the voices of contemporary sounds. And, secondly, the
warning was, “Do not interpret these poems; just let the students hear them.” No quiz; no
midterm; just hear the poem. [I was] hoping—and, really, confidently believing—that no matter
how recalcitrant the student was, or [how] resistant to poetry, that one of those poems would
probably stick because they’re funny and they’re clever and they can pretty much be gotten in
one hearing. Obviously I’m not going to go in there and change the teaching of poetry, but the
hope was that I would present an alternative way to present poetry. And I’ve got to tell you quite
modestly, if I had a nickel for every high-school teacher who came up and thanked me after a
reading, I would have a lot of nickels. It seems that the program and the subsequent anthologies
really work in the practical world.
Chapter 16: You recently told an audience at Cornell [8], “The trouble with poetry is its
availability: you can pick up a 29-cent pen and express yourself. Self-expression is overrated. If I
were Emperor of Poetry, I would make everyone learn to play the trumpet before they could write
poetry, just to make it difficult.” It’s a little surprising to hear that a writer whose work is routinely
described as “accessible” longs for a way to make writing poems more difficult.
Collins: These are two very different uses of “accessibility.” What I’m accused of by critics is that
my poems are accessible—that anyone can read them with a certain degree of comprehension.
I’m not trying to make my poems inconvenient to read. You can get into them and understand
them pretty quickly.
What I meant in the comment at Cornell was the means of writing poetry are too accessible. In
other words, if you were to play the cello, you’d have to obviously go to school and buy a cello
and practice. Even oil painting or ballet requires lessons; you wouldn’t just get up there and start
jumping around in a tutu. And you wouldn’t just pick up the trumpet and just blare into it.
"The training in poetry is reading. Reading, reading, reading. Reading from Chaucer
on. Reading the Spanish poets. Reading John Donne. Reading, reading, reading.
Memorizing ten Emily Dickinson poems. That's the training."
But [with] poetry, people think you just pick up a pen and start writing down how sad you are in
the middle of the night, and add some autumn leaves, and you’ve got a poem. The training in
poetry—the training for a musical instrument—is hours and hours of practice. And Malcolm
Gladwell recently said [in his book, Outliers, that] to be really, really good at something, let’s say
the violin, it requires 10,000 hours minimum—ten thousand tours! When I read that book of
Gladwell’s, I thought, “Yeah, I’m of a certain age, and I’ve easily spent 10,000 hours reading,
writing, and teaching poetry.” The training in poetry is reading. Reading, reading, reading.
Reading from Chaucer on. Reading the Spanish poets. Reading John Donne. Reading, reading,
reading. Memorizing ten Emily Dickinson poems. That’s the training.
If you pay ten dollars to go to a piano concert or a string quartet, and you sat down on the
twelfth row, and they started playing, and after a few seconds it was very clear that they were
very, very bad—just terrible: wrong notes, confused—you would walk out and get your money
back. However, most of us will sit in a terrible poetry reading and not understand a word that’s
said, and just take it. I don’t know why we do that. That’s what I meant. Those are two very
different deployments of the word “accessible.”
Chapter 16: I found an old interview you did with The New York Times [9], where you said, ''As
I'm writing, I'm always reader conscious. I have one reader in mind, someone who is in the room
with me, and who I'm talking to, and I want to make sure I don't talk too fast, or too glibly.
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Usually I try to create a hospitable tone at the beginning of a poem. Stepping from the title to the
first lines is like stepping into a canoe. A lot of things can go wrong.'' Can you describe the
reader you’re imagining as you write?
Collins: I can’t really pretend to be someone else. If I could, if I had that capacity, I’d probably
write fiction because that involves a degree of empathy where you can imagine yourself to be
someone else. But I lack that form of empathy, and the only person I really think I understand is
myself. So my reader is probably me. But as I’m writing, I’m switching from writer to reader,
writer-reader, writer-reader. I keep going back and forth. I’m really checking for
comprehensibility.
And then, at some point, I’m asking the reader for more—not making it easy for the reader to
follow. My sense of my own poetry—which doesn’t apply to all poetry—[is that I] start very clearly
and end up in some kind of fog, some kind of hypothetical Alice in Wonderland. They start very
simply—I’m looking out the window or taking the dog for a walk—and they end up in some
conditional make-believe area. The end of the poem would be inaccessible if it were not for the
beginning of the poem.
Chapter 16: Critics, too, have noted your tendency to begin by describing something very
ordinary, and in very conversational language, only to take a turn for the distinctly original and
unexpected at the end. When you sit down to write a poem, do you have some idea where it’s
going from the beginning?
Collins: Yeah, well almost never. You can look ahead just a little bit, just enough to kind of keep
going. The metaphor of driving at night might apply: your headlights throw light ahead of you to
keep driving but they don’t show you much more than that. I would say that the best poems [I’ve
written] are the ones where I’m really surprised at the ending. I don’t know how I got there, but I
am really surprised and delighted. It’s almost as if the ending of the poem is not just a
conclusion, but it’s a new discovery of some revelation that is only possible because of the words
above it. It’s like the poem is the only path to get to this place. The one way to get there.
In some cases I’m not going anywhere, and then I stop writing.
Chapter 16: Entertainment Weekly once called you “the best buggy-whip maker of the 21st
century.” [10] Any response?
Collins: What does it mean, exactly?
Chapter 16: I think it means that Entertainment Weekly believes you’re really good at an art
that’s now completely irrelevant.
Collins: That’s probably right. It doesn’t mean that I’m old-fashioned; it just means that people
don’t use buggy whips anymore.
We talked about Henry, whose very basic delight in word play—with chariot and cherry
pie—went through a kind of ruination. At some point it advances from being a simple
pleasure—like the pleasure of a bowl of pasta or something that delivers the pleasure
immediately—to a pleasure that requires study. That requires reading a lot of poetry.
Most people don’t have that devotion. It’s a minority sport. It’s not something that everybody
plays. And the irony is that poetry really tries to talk to everybody because poetry does deal with
these very basic human emotions, and because poetry values subjectivity. It lights up inner parts
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of you—your appreciation of nature, your conscience, your desire for love. All these areas of
your interior are being sparked by a poem, and so one might say, “Why doesn’t everybody read
it? It sounds pretty good.” But most people don’t. It doesn’t play any part in most people’s lives.
All you have to do is say to somebody next to you on an airplane that you’re a poet. You get
some pretty strange reactions.
Chapter 16: And yet, even before you were appointed poet laureate, The New York Times called
you “the most popular poet in America.” [9]
Collins: I don’t know why I became popular. To tell you the truth, it’s basically NPR.
Chapter 16: Your buddy Garrison Keillor?
"I would say that the best poems [I've written] are the ones where I'm really surprised
at the ending. … It's almost as if the ending of the poem is not just a conclusion, but
it's a new discovery of some revelation that is only possible because of the words
above it. It's like the poem is the only path to get to this place."
Collins: And my buddy Terry Gross. They had a lot to do with the audience for my work. It’s just
an incredibly powerful medium, radio. And perfectly suited to poetry. Now instead of reading to
twenty-five people at the local women’s club, you’re reading to three million people when you’re
reading on A Prairie Home Companion or Fresh Air. And very few poets get that chance.
Chapter 16: Readers coming to your work for the first time—through radio, or even at your
public appearance in Nashville—might be surprised to encounter so much wit, and even outright
humor, in your poems. Do you ever find that people in your audiences, especially when you read
to students, are shy about laughing at the funny parts?
Collins: They are at first, but they’re relieved to be able to. And then for some people it’s like
giggling in church. But I think it usually comes as a relief to people. And of course the other
audience—the people who know my work and who read other poets—know that humor has
reclaimed its place in poetry. There’s an anthology that just came out this year called Seriously
Funny, and it’s a collection of maybe forty poets who write humorous poems that are not silly.
They use humor to get into serious stuff.
Chapter 16: You mentioned that the initial experience of poetry is pleasure and that to get
beyond that experience requires some study and some effort. Didn’t Wordsworth say that the
point of poetry is pleasure? What would you say is the point of poetry?
Collins: It can’t really exist as a communicative medium without pleasure. I wrote a dissertation
on Wordsworth, so I have an unfair advantage here: Wordsworth mentions pleasure over fifty
times. In his essay, “A Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” he just keeps chiming this note of giving
pleasure. Indeed, that’s why I write it, and that’s why I read it.
I myself wrote an article called “Poetry, Pleasure, and the Hedonist Reader.” I don’t read to be
edified, to increase the capacity of my soul, although if those things happen as byproducts,
that’s great. I read for pleasure, verbal pleasure, and the kind of pleasure that you get from
“Swing Low, Sweet Cherry Pie.” I find that very pleasurable. I’ll probably be laughing about it for
days. Either you think that’s really funny or you don’t. And if you don’t, probably something that
takes language as seriously as poetry is not for you.
No, it has to begin with pleasure. Verbal pleasure or imagery, which is another kind of pleasure.
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The pleasure of metaphor—there can be far-fetched connections between things, and that’s a
mental pleasure for a lot of people. For a lot of people it really isn’t. And that’s probably why
poetry, even though we did say it speaks to the human soul, is not for everybody.
Chapter 16: Have you ever seen that YouTube video of a tiny kid reciting your poem, “Litany”
[11]?
Collins: I’ve not only seen it, I’m addicted to watching it. I think the kid is so astonishing. I don’t
know if I should say this, but I’ve seen it about twenty times. It was brought to my attention back
in May, I think, and there were something like 500 hits [at the time], and now there are—I haven’t
checked recently—but there were about 300,000 last time I looked. I’m actually in touch with the
child and his mother. They live in Arizona, and I’m going to go there to read next month, I think,
and we’re going to get together. That child does not read—he’s three years old—yet he says
things like “speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world.”
Chapter 16: He seems to illustrate your point that we’re born for poetry.
Collins: Well, I think we all are.
Source URL (retrieved on 11/15/2010 - 12:10pm): http://www.chapter16.org/content/wordsworths-heir
Links:
[1] http://www.chapter16.org/sites/default/files/ballistics_jkt.jpg
[2] http://www.powells.com/partner/34280/biblio/978-0812975611
[3] http://www.chapter16.org/sites/default/files/billy_collins_fp.jpg
[4] http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/july-dec01/collins_12-10.html
[5] http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/
[6] http://literaryaward.nashvillepubliclibrary.org/category/2010-literary-award/
[7] http://www.billy-collins.com/2005/06/the_names_billy.html
[8] http://cornellsun.com/section/news/content/2010/03/12/former-poet-laureate-billy-collins-discusses-his-craft
[9] http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0DE0DE1130F93AA25751C1A96F958260&ref=billy_collins
[10] http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,1131658,00.html
[11] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVu4Me_n91Y&NR=1
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By JOHN BECK
FOR THE PRESS DEMOCRAT
Published: Thursday, April 15, 2010 at 3:00 a.m.
It doesn't bother Billy Collins that hardly
anyone — aside from captive students and
die-hard devotees of verse — seems to read
poetry anymore. Or, more dire, that the poet
seems destined to slope in regression along the
dead-end path of the blacksmith, the cobbler,
the bookbinder and the dodo.
“I don't really have any Utopian vision of
America where everyone is reading poetry,” he
Billy Collins has been called “the most popular
poet in America” by the New York Times.
says. “I would probably stop reading it if everybody read it. I wouldn't say elitist, but
it's kind of a special appetite.”
The professor and two-time U.S. poet laureate also makes a living as a best-selling
poet — a rarity in this age of iPads and Web fads. Seizing on seemingly ephemeral
nuggets of daily life, he writes in a chatty, conversational meter often spiked with a
wry twist.
Those who criticize him often dwell on the simplicity. Those who admire him do so
for exactly the same reason — he makes it all so easy to digest.
When the New York Times called him “the most popular poet in America,” it became
“sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy,” he says. “When people hear that, they feel they
should go ahead and buy your book.”
But when you think about it, “To say anyone is the most popular poet in America
isn't saying much,” he adds.
Likening the fan base to those who treasure wooden boats, the music of silent films
or jazz, he imagines “poets will always be around, limping along with the same
modest audience. It's the only history we have of human emotion.”
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Before Collins drops in for a reading at Wells Fargo Center for the Arts, he took time
out to chat about inspiration, isolation and never-ending distraction.
Q: What's the daily ritual of the poet?
A: It used to be I would have a lot of time to myself to do what poets are supposed to
do, which is basically wool-gathering and examining the clouds and picking acorns
— the basic nuts and bolts of the poetic life. But — how do you put it without
sounding like a hornblowing jackass? — I've now developed a significant career in
poetry. Along with that comes a lot of little tasks ... Well, talking to you is one,
nothing personal. But it's like running a little cottage industry of yourself, where
there's a lot of mail to be answered and requests and connecting people with people
and setting up readings and this whole poetry industry.
Q: Not the reason you got into poetry in the first place, I imagine.
A: No. In fact, it's antithetical to the reason I got into poetry in the first place. One of
the things that attracted me to poetry was it's an activity that takes place in deep
isolation. You're alone with the language.
Q: And you liked that? You were attracted to that?
A: Oh yeah. It's just that now you have a lot of public pulling of me in the opposite
direction, which is out of the cave, out of the lair and behind the microphone. But
I'm not complaining.
Q: I often hear you described as a poet of the common man, which reminds me of
Wordsworth describing how he wanted to write “in the real language of men.” Do
you find that a backhanded compliment?
A: I'm taking so much criticism from all sides, it's hard to know what's a regular
compliment, a backhanded compliment or an insult.
Q: What do you mean?
A: Well, I was looking at some blog today where I'm being crucified for being
namby-pamby and simple-minded and sentimental. I suppose I slip into some of
those things sometimes.
Q: What were you reading around the time when you were first turned on to poetry
as a teenager — aside from Lawrence Ferlinghetti?
A: I was reading the Beats and then I was reading school poetry, which didn't turn
me on. You know, the dead white males with three names and beards — (Henry
Wadsworth) Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant — older traditional 19th century
poets. And then I started finding out about contemporary poetry, mainly through the
Beats. And then I started reading Poetry magazine and I got to listen to poets that
were sounding like contemporary voices. Their poems sounded not completely
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different from American speech spoken around me. So I would just latch on to any
adult poet that seemed to have an interesting voice and I'd go about trying to learn
from them, trying to imitate them through acts of robbery or whatever.
Q: Which you detail in “The Trouble with Poetry.”
A: Yeah, there's some of that in there, especially Ferlinghetti.
Q: Did you have to work to find that conversational voice or did that come naturally?
A: It took decades to find. My first book was published when I was in my 40s. Prior
to that, the problem was, I was sending poems out, but I really wasn't publishable
because I was badly imitating. I hadn't figured something out, which I think anyone
with a fresh voice either figures out or it comes about by trial and error, and that is
how to combine a number of influences — maybe six or 10 of them actually — how to
combine them in such a way that they're not recognizable.
Q: So they become your own.
A: Exactly. A lot of young poets think that by finding their voice, they have to look
inside — sort of like figuring out if you're one of the chosen. But I try to tell them you
don't have to get all navel-gazing about it. The sources of your voice are external to
yourself. They're really the voices of other poets. A lot of young people say, “No, I've
got to find my own voice, not their voice — they already have their voice.” Usually if
they force themselves down that road, they end up writing the most unoriginal stuff
imaginable because they are imitating without knowing.
Bay Area freelancer John Beck writes about entertainment for The Press Democrat.
You can reach him at 280-8014, john@sideshowvideo.com and follow on Twitter
@becksay.
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