Poet Laureate: Billy Collins

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• ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH:

  The new poet laureate is Billy Collins, and he gave his inaugural reading at the Library of Congress last week. He is the author of six collections of verse, the most recent, Sailing Alone Around the Room, was published in September and it's been a best seller in San Francisco, Boston, and other cities. The book is in its fifth printing, which is unusual for poetry. Collins is Professor of English at Lehman College, City university of New York, where he has taught for 30 years. Thanks for being with us, Mr. Collins, and congratulations on being Poet Laureate.

• BILLY COLLINS, Poet Laureate:

  Thank you very much. It's good to be here.

• ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH:

  I want to talk about this issue of accessibility. I notice that the word "accessible" is used a lot in reviews and discussions of your poetry meaning, I guess, easy to understand. It is a word you like? Do you try to be accessible?

• BILLY COLLINS:

  Well, I've gotten tired of it actually. It's a little overused, not just in application to my work, but a lot of other poets I think. I think accessible just means that the reader can walk into the poem without difficulty. The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is what happens to the reader once he or she gets inside the poem? That's the real question for me, is getting the reader into the poem and then taking the reader somewhere because I think of poetry as a kind of form of travel writing.

• ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH:

  You have a poem that's kind of about this. Read it. We'll keep on with this discussion.

• BILLY COLLINS:

  Well, the poem is called "Introduction to Poetry." It's about the teaching of poetry to students. "Introduction to Poetry." "I asked 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 water ski across the surface of a poem waving at the author's name on the shore 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."

• ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH:

  (Laughs) There's a lot here. Part of it is just you're asking people to approach this with a lighter heart than they sometimes think they should, right?

• BILLY COLLINS:

  I think so. Often people, when they're confronted with a poem, it's like someone who keep saying "what is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of this?" And that dulls us to the other pleasures poetry offers.

• ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH:

  Is it… Would you say it's something of a cause with you or has been to avoid pomposity? To… It's subtle what you're doing. It isn't that it's easy. It looks very hard to me, but it is… You use the word "hospitable." You're very hospitable to your reader.

• BILLY COLLINS:

  Well, I think I'm making up for previous sins, because when I was in graduate school, I was taught that difficulty was part of the value of poetry, and I committed the sin of difficulty over and over again in my earlier writing. It took quite a while for me just to try to speak more clearly. I'm very aware of the presence of a reader, and that probably is a reaction against a lot of poems that I do read which seem oblivious to my presence as a reader.

• ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH:

  Do you think that American poetry has gotten too difficult?

• BILLY COLLINS:

  Well, I think it's getting… I think it reached a high-water mark of difficulty probably in the '50s and '60s, but I think there's a lot of very good, plainspoken poetry today. There are interesting forms of difficulty, and there are unprofitable forms of difficulty. I mean, I enjoy some difficult poetry, but some of it is impenetrable and I actually wouldn't want to penetrate it if I could perhaps.

• ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH:

  (Laughs) You use humor a lot. You really like humor in your poetry, don't you?

• BILLY COLLINS:

  Well, humor for me is really a gate of departure. It's a way of enticing a reader into a poem so that less funny things can take place later. It really is not an end in itself, but a means to an end.

• ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH:

  Let's read one of your poems, which isn't humorous.

• BILLY COLLINS:

  Well, that might be hard to find. Well, this is a poem called "Design." "I pour a coating of salt on the table and make a circle in it with my finger. This is a cycle of life, I say to no one; this is the wheel of fortune, the Arctic Circle. This is the ring of Kerry and the White Rose of Trulli. I say to the ghosts of my family, the dead fathers, the aunt who drowned, my unborn brothers and sisters, my unborn children. This is the sun with its glittering spokes and the bitter moon. This is the absolute circle of geometry I say to the crack in the wall, to the birds who cross the window, this is the wheel I just invented to roll through the rest of my life, I say, touching my finger to my tongue."

• ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH:

  A circle of salt. This is a bleak poem.

• BILLY COLLINS:

  Well, there's a little salty taste at the end of it. It's a meditation on a little geometric form. I think it might be an example of starting a poem with something simple. I always found– as a child, at least– if there was sugar or salt poured on the table it was irresistible to draw something in it, some little ideogram or a mark. And it just takes something very basic like that and scrutinizes it. I mean, I have a theory, really it's an analogy, that if time… Rather if matter is made of atoms and when you smash an atom it releases all this energy, that time is made of moments and when you scrutinize a moment in a poem, it also can release a kind of energy. And that poem is trying to focus on something and then by scrutinizing it taking its layers off and seeing what's there.

• ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH:

  When you sit down and scrutinize that moment, do you try to write the poem in one sitting? How do you do it?

• BILLY COLLINS:

  Yes, I write pretty rapidly. I mean maybe my critics would say, "well, that's obvious." But I try to do it in one sitting only because I want the poem to… I have a feeling of momentum when I'm writing, and I want the moment to get to its ending because that's, for me, is the destination. I mean, the poem for me is like a ride and I'm the first one to take the ride. I want… And so I'm the first one to arrive. The conclusion for the reader is really the destination for me. And I couldn't just write eight lines of a poem and then come back to it a few days later. I have to complete this ride and discover the destination of the poem.

• ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH:

  So you complete it fairly quickly, but then do then do you work on it for a long time afterwards?

• BILLY COLLINS:

  Oh, sure. I mean, you go back and you think of another… Mostly it's getting the rhythm right and getting the cadence or just finding a better… It's polishing and working, as someone said, with tinier and tinier screwdrivers on it. But the initial rush is pretty much done fairly quickly, like a sketch.

• ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH:

  And how will being Poet Laureate change what you do? Do you have big plans for your term of office?

• BILLY COLLINS:

  Well, it's helping myself esteem to a great degree. But more than personally, well, I have one initiative called poetry 180, which is the idea is to get a poem read every day in American high schools as part of the public announcements. I am hand picking 180 poems, which I think are, well, accessible, for lack of a better word or hospitable. And I hope that they will… High schools will pick up on this. We're going to list the poems on the Library of Congress Web site at the beginning of the year next year. The idea would be to have high school students hear a poem every day, so that the poem will be a feature of daily life and not something that's just taught. I'm going to discourage teachers from teaching the poem or bringing it into the classroom. So right now, we're kind of constructing this jukebox of poems, and once it's up, we'll plug it in and it will run.

• ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH:

  Sounds great to me. Thanks for being with us and congratulations Billy Collins.

• BILLY COLLINS:

  Thank you.