Billy Collins’ Wonderful World of Words

"The pen is an instrument of discovery" - Collins

Dear friends,

Among my favorite memories is the time I went to see Billy Collins (1941- )¹ deliver his poetry in person. It was 2016, the same year I started my poetry social media project. Collins’ poems have played (and continue to play) a prominent role in that project. Because they tend to be delightful, accessible, and unexpectedly profound, I find that they play well to the general public. So when I learned about the Collins event in Reston, Virginia, I knew I had to go.

Trouble was, it was a school night, and Reston was no small trip (nearly 3 hours each way). After a bit of waffling, I decided to go for it, with David’s encouragement. I would leave after class and come back in the morning for the next day’s classes. It was a tough addition to the middle of a semester, but the trip ended up being more than worth it. Had I known in advance how edifying and inspiring the event would be, I wouldn’t have hesitated for a second.

Captivating Collins

Billy Collins, 2007 by Marcelo Noah

In an earlier piece about Collins, I describe his charms this way:

Anyone who has heard Collins give a reading knows that he revels in the magic of words. The consummate literary experimenter, Collins encourages us to find that magic, too.... Although his images and topics are drawn from everyday life, he draws from them the wonder that he finds, and through his literary skill, he asks readers to discover that wonder themselves.

Reveling in Language

Poems are primarily an auditory experience. Even when it’s written down, a poem’s aural quality makes itself felt. Even silent reading encourages us to internalize its rhythm and rhyme. The texture and fullness of the words and lines occupy what seems to be physical space in our minds. But only on reading or listening to a poem out loud does it reach its full potential.

That’s what I experienced on my trip to see Collins. He skillfully delivers his poetry, letting the words convey the experience rather than feeling the need for theatrics or dramatic flourish. The voice, the imagery, the emotional atmosphere: all these aspects emerge from the words themselves with no need for embellishment by the performer’s facial expressions, gestures, or vocal affectation.

You can find many examples online of these Collins readings, such as this one:

Here is someone who clearly enjoys words and who sees and embraces their playful potential.

Even while offering a meditation about the inevitable decline that accompanies aging, Collins leavens that loss with whimsy. “Forgetfulness,” ironically enough, helps us remember the human power to re-create, to weave new wonders from misfortune and to deny tragedy the final word.²

Pay It Forward

Collins has spent his career advancing the virtues of poetry, both through his writing and in his various posts, including as Poet Laureate of the United States (2001-2003). During his tenure, Collins developed the Poetry 180 project, a collection of poems intended for use in high schools. The idea is to provide students a poem for each school day of the year, to help nourish and elevate their spirits.

As Collins explains in the collection’s introduction, “Poems can inspire and make us think about what it means to be a member of the human race. By just spending a few minutes reading a poem each day, new worlds can be revealed.”

He chose high school as the locus of the initiative, he says, “because all too often, it is the place where poetry goes to die.”³ I recognize this dilemma myself when I cover poetry in my intro lit classes. I firmly believe that poetry belongs in a liberal arts program of study, but its inclusion as a scholastic requirement risks its devaluation. Poetry is seen as one more hoop to jump through, just another box to check off. That’s a real shame since poetry is meant to tap into our humanity, to help us flourish and thrive.

Collins himself captures this challenge in “Introduction to Poetry,” a delightful poem that builds on a series of ingenious metaphors. Like most teachers, the speaker has great intentions. He hopes to show students the joys of poetry and how verse can enrich their lives.⁴ And the comparisons in the poem do just that, highlighting myriad methods of poetic engagement:

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.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

Even still, after all those attractive and arguably fun options, the students fall back on old, inflexible habits that wrest from the poem any vestiges of joy:

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.

It’s a graphic image to be sure, admittedly tempered by its application to a poem. In this way, the poem vividly asserts, with more than a little justification, that our attitude going into a poem will dictate what we get from it.

More Than Meaning

For Collins, it’s the experience of poetry that should lead. Analysis may have its place, but never at the expense of a poem’s jouissance.⁵ What Collins says in an interview with PBS Newshour underscores this priority: “Often people, when they're confronted with a poem, it's like someone who keeps saying ‘what is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of this?’ And that dulls us to the other pleasures poetry offers.”⁶

He’s getting at that same idea in his poem, “Thesaurus.” These collections of synonyms and antonyms can be helpful for writers groping for just the right word (ask me how I know). But they can also become a crutch for developing writers⁷ and obscure the surprise of words discovered in their natural habitat—in communication, expression, reflection.

We reach for words to articulate, to convey, to transmit what’s ultimately ineffable.⁸ What we learn from Collins is that it’s the striving that matters. That’s where we connect with others, with our world, with ourselves.

In that process, there is life and creative, dynamic force, as the poem’s conclusion both affirms and demonstrates:

I would rather see words out on their own, away
from their families and the warehouse of Roget,
wandering the world where they sometimes fall in love
with another word, completely unlike themselves.
Surely you have seen pairs of them living contentedly
Together on the same line inside a poem,
a small chapel where weddings like these,
between perfect strangers, are known to take place.

And honestly, that sounds to me like the perfect description of a Collins poem.

Miscellany

I have a piece on The Holdovers, out today with the Christian Scholar’s Review blog. Alexander Payne’s recent film explores the unlikely bond that develops among outcasts at a prestigious New England boarding school. Although the film has a Christmas twist, its message transcends the season. I found it deeply moving and try to explain my takeaway here: “Spoiled Hopes and Recovered Dreams in The Holdovers.”

The Holdovers is now streaming on Peacock, and I highly recommend it. If you watch it, please do let me know what you think.

Blessings, all, and I’ll see you next week.

Marybeth

1. See Poetry Foundation’s overview of Collins’ life and work at this link.

2. Collins’ poems focus on the human realm and rarely appeal to the divine, at least insofar as I can tell. They nevertheless hint at something beyond our material, immanent reality to something transcendent. The act of artistic creation as hope, I think, is one such way he does so. Pushed too far, this notion collapses, of course, as human beings cannot remake the fallen world on their own, even if they participate in its redemption. I talk about that a bit here: “Better Together, Part Three: Literary Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.”

3. Billy Collins, Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry (New York: Random House, 2003), xvii.

4. Another poem that highlights the way school can often interfere with real learning is Taylor Mali’s “Undivided Attention,” one of my favorite poetry shares from last year.

5. Collins doesn’t use this term, but his vision of poetry seems to track that of Roland Barthes, so I thought this word appropriate.

6. “Poet Laureate: Billy Collins,” PBS Newshour, December 10, 2001.

7. I found this apropos FB post I wrote a few years back: “Note to student writers: stick with words you know, words you use, words you feel comfortable with. Doing otherwise makes the finished product awkward and unwieldy, not the type of text many would enjoy reading. Expanding one's vocabulary is a laudable endeavor, but the process is more gradual and involved than can be achieved by plugging words into a thesaurus during a paper-writing session.”

8. One more reason to think there’s something insidious about ChatGPT, which treats words as no more than tokens to be traded and objects to be returned on command.