Firstly, it is quite obvious that Billy Collins has quite a thing for nature. In almost all of his poems, he makes descriptions of scenes he has been in or imagined, and describes them with flawless details.
            In his poem “Fishing On The Susquehanna In July” for example, he describes the river perfectly, saying;

“that river curled around a bend under a blue cloud-ruffled sky, dense trees along the banks.” This is astounding imagery, and it makes the reader able to see the river itself clearly in their mind, just like the painting Collins was observing himself. To continue, in his poem “Bonsai,” Collins explains how when looking at the miniature tree, it can “throw a room completely out of whack.” He imagines “The book of matches is a raft, and the coffee cup a cistern to catch the same rain that moistens its small plot of dark, mossy earth.” This puts a lucid imagine in the readers head, and he can see the Bonsai tree sitting on a small island amongst the “Raft” and the “Cistern.”

            In his poem “The Night House,” Collins explains how during the day people are working, and during the night our consciousness awakes and roams around the house. In this poem he uses incredible description to show the reader scenes. For example, Collins writes; “Every day the bod works in the fields of the world mending a stone wall or swinging a sickle through the tall grass – the grass of civics, the grass of money…” This causes the reader to have a crystal clear image of someone cutting grass with a sickle in a meadow or field. By using this genius metaphor, Collins also makes the reader see how the field represents life, and the person he is talking about in the poem is earning money by cutting “the grass of money.”

            Conclusively, it is obvious that Billy Collins has an exquisite talent when it comes to describing scenery and placing a vivid image in the readers head. I’m sure there are many more of his poems that include explicit pictures that can be thrown into ones mind, and make the reader feel like they are actually on the scene Collins is illustrating.

Interview with Billy Collins

Billy Collins is a deeply humorous poet—a description that only begins to suggest the wide talent of his writing. His work is both penetrating and unflinching in its portrayals of an often less-than-holy world, as well as delightfully unpredictable. A hungry reader, Collins creates a poetic world filled with historical figures and vivid facts that bubble up from all parts of the globe. His work negotiates a smart, lucid path between an outright love for the world and a healthy suspiciousness of it. Packed with powerful, original images, his poems turn unexpected corners and surprise the reader with their lush language and generous imagination.
This interview was conducted via a series of e-mails in January 2001.

Alexandra van de Kamp: In previous interviews, you’ve commented on how you see your poems as modes of travel that take the reader to unexpected places. You also describe the writing process in your poems as a voyage or odyssey of sorts. Can you explain this further?

Billy Collins: When I say that poetry is the oldest form of travel writing, of course, I mean imaginative travel as well as geographical. Like Borges, who described himself as a “hedonist reader,” I admittedly read for pleasure, and one of the great pleasures that poetry offers is to be moved from one place in the mind to another, often from a place that exists in reality to one that exists in the imagination, especially if that second place never existed before the poem was written. All poems do not aim for this vehicular power, but I tend to judge them by that standard. Actually, I am not really judging when I read someone’s poem. I am just waiting to go somewhere. Anywhere. Some poems fly into completely new realms, others never leave the hangar. Travel also relieves the boredom of writing. When I am composing, I am looking for a side road or an escape hatch so that I can leave the first part of the poem behind, which is usually just bait, or scene-setting, and go somewhere new.

Alexandra van de Kamp: How has geographic travel played a role in your poetic life?
 
Billy Collins: As far as actual travel, it has little direct influence on my writing. I just mean that when I get back from a trip to Italy, for example, I have no desire to sit down and start writing about Italy. Something I saw might enter a poem unexpectedly at a later date, so the influence is oblique. I remember being in Spain when I was a young man—on the Costa del Sol—and every day seeing a donkey chained to a post in the middle of a field, braying in the heat. Maybe twenty years later he turned up in a poem which was neither about Spain nor donkeys. A lot of the travel I do now is for the sake of poetry, giving readings, conducting workshops and whatnot. These trips are not conducive to writing. All I want to do is watch television at its very lowest level. I try to find the absolute worst program and watch it until I fall asleep. I am with Emily Dickinson who wrote several poems about the lack of a need to travel to write, and of course, she exemplified the notion in extremis. I write best at home—often about home. The title of my new and selected poems, after all, is Sailing Alone Around the Room.
Alexandra van de Kamp: This sense of home, of relishing the everyday places we occupy, seems to play a key role in the landscape of your poems. Can you comment on how “retreat” or “place” has figured in your work?
 
Billy Collins: Like the three secrets to a successful business, the poem for me needs location, location, location. This goes back to the idea of the poem as a means of travel. If the poem is to transport the reader to some Elsewhere, it must start in a Somewhere, and for me that is Here, where I am writing, usually at home. Poems that begin with a sense of place have somewhere else to go. By the way, I don’t mean “sense of place” in the regional sense that Southern writers keep applauding. The place can just as easily be the place of composition—this desk, this road I am walking. These poems are kind of occasional poems in that they begin by establishing a setting, an occasion for the act of composing. This begins, I think, with the Romantics, the poet usually located in an agreeable landscape setting. But Coleridge can be indoors as in “Frost at Midnight” or in his garden as in “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” which opens “Well, they are gone and here must I remain.” The “here” in that line is fresh in poetry at the time. Coleridge is a poet of the domicile. Someone once called me an “indoor nature poet,” which is a charge I would have to cop to.

I think the sense of the place of writing is related to the connection between retreat and creativity. The writing workshop suggests that writing can be socialized, but I would throw in with Gaston Bachelard’s idea of “felicitous space,” private nooks where children hide and where their imaginations are formed. Poets and other creative types have simply managed to emerge from those hiding places with their imaginations intact, trailing clouds of imaginative glory—if that doesn’t sound too lofty. 

Alexandra van de Kamp: You mention Coleridge. In other interviews, you’ve talked about how reading Keats played a pivotal role in the maturation of your poetic style and how the Beats were an important influence earlier in your career. Could you talk a little bit about these influences and who you are reading now?
 
Billy Collins: Influence is always a looming question for me. Danilo Kis said that when we ask a writer about his influences, we are treating him like an infant in a basket abandoned on the front steps of a convent. We want to know who his parents are. I think if any writer was aware of all of his influences, he would be like the centipede who fell over when he started thinking about how his hundred legs were able to move at the same time. The knowledge would be paralyzing. Also, talk of influences tends to be unreliable, because we tend to invent our influences, just as we invent our parents at some point in our lives. Our entire past.
A more helpful influence came in the form of a little Penguin paperback—which I still have—called The New Poetry. It was edited by A. Alvarez and was my first exposure to poets like Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, Charles Tomlinson and others. I carried this book with me everywhere I went in high school. I loved the clarity and the irony and the mostly simple language. Lines like:
          The wind blew all my wedding-day,
          And my wedding night was the night of the high wind
I didn’t know if Larkin was kidding or not, and that’s just the way I wanted to keep it. I would say something like that is the ideal tone for me in my poems, a tone that would be perfectly balanced between feeling and irony. Very difficult to do. Because it’s so easy to fall into one extreme or the other and write a poem that is sappy or too cute or hard-boiled. In that same little book was Lowell’s naked poetry, and Thom Gunn, who wrote poems about bikers and Elvis Presley. I was listening to Elvis around the clock, but I never knew you could write poems about him. I was the prisoner of an older decorum, and these poets showed me the way out.

The question of influence leads into everything eventually. I could go on. But when I am asked if there is a Biggest Influence, I have gotten into the habit of just saying “Coleridge.” Why not? Most of us first encounter Coleridge through the “mystery poems,” those dream-like poems where we are taken on a journey (“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”) or we get a tour of a dream-like landscape (as in “Kubla Khan”). One reason why Coleridge was fond of the dream state was that it allowed him to focus entirely on one thing at a time. He said that in dreams he never felt as though he were thinking of one thing while looking at something else as he almost always did while conscious.

To find out more about the interview click the link below.
http://www.terraincognita.50megs.com/interview.html

BILLY COLLINS, A GLOBETROTTER OR BOOKWORM OR BOTH?

Billy Collins is a reflective poet, and in this blog post I am going to discuss (or at least try) the initiative behind his poems. It is important to note that Billy Collins notes that his mother’s love of poetry played a role in his poems, quoted in the Paris review, ‘poetry was sort of threaded into her talk, as she described her mother. Time to discuss whether Billy Collins was just an expansive traveler or an expansive reader, and if both which played more of a significant role in his writings.

Is Billy Collins a globetrotter? Definitely! In many interviews he plays down the role that geographical travel has had on him, however in one of the interviews conducted over email Billy Collins acknowledges the role geographical travel has had on him. When asked ‘How has Geographical travel played a role in your life?’ Billy Collins responds by saying, ‘It has little direct influence on my writing. I am with Emily Dickinson who wrote several poems about the lack of a need to travel to write, and of course, she exemplified the notion in extremis. I write best at home.’ Even though the answer shows that geographical travel isn’t what drives his ideas in his poems he acknowledges the fact that travelling is something he does a lot. Although he is not sure the part geographical travel plays certainly in his poems adding in the interview later on that, ‘ Something I saw might enter a poem unexpectedly at a later date, so the influence is oblique.’ Once again Billy Collins remains to be nothing but a mystery.

To add on, after coming to a not so flattering inference about the role geographical travel has had in his writings, I am going to focus now on wider reading, does it play a part in his poems? Does he conform to this and say that it is through being a book worm that he has a vast number of direct references to artists, politicians, reformists, fellow poets and even musicians (especially jazz artistes)? Once again I’ll refer to the same interview by Alexandra van De Kamp interviewing Billy Collins via email. Alexandra asked Billy Collins on the significance of Coleridge’s work and how reading Keats played a role in the maturation of his poetic style, Billy Collins responded, “Influence is always a looming question for me. Danilo Kis said that when we ask a writer about his influences, we are treating him like an infant in a basket abandoned on the front steps of a convent. We want to know who his parents are. I think if any writer was aware of all of his influences, he would be like the centipede who fell over when he started thinking about how his hundred legs were able to move at the same time. The knowledge would be paralyzing. Also, talk of influences tends to be unreliable, because we tend to invent our influences, just as we invent our parents at some point in our lives. Our entire past.

But there are moments. I was a most impressionable teenager back in the days of Beatnik glory, so I responded fully to Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti’s “Coney Island of the Mind”—still a good title—Gregory Corso and others. I was in Paris for a summer in the early sixties and hung self-consciously around the corners of the scene on the Boul Mich, as they called it. I sat at the same table with Corso and others, and I even hung around with an American girl named Ann Campbell, whom Realities magazine had called “The Queen of the Beatniks.” (Let’s see...what did that make me??) But mostly I was a Catholic high school boy in the suburbs who fantasized about stealing a car and driving non-stop to Denver. I probably would have done it, but I didn’t have access to those special driving pills Neal Cassidy had. Plus, there was always a test to study for, or band practice.

A more helpful influence came in the form of a little Penguin paperback—which I still have—called The New Poetry. It was edited by A. Alvarez and was my first exposure to poets like Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, Charles Tomlinson and others. I carried this book with me everywhere I went in high school. I loved the clarity and the irony and the mostly simple language. Lines like:

          The wind blew all my wedding-day,
          And my wedding night was the night of the high wind

I didn’t know if Larkin was kidding or not, and that’s just the way I wanted to keep it. I would say something like that is the ideal tone for me in my poems, a tone that would be perfectly balanced between feeling and irony. Very difficult to do. Because it’s so easy to fall into one extreme or the other and write a poem that is sappy or too cute or hard-boiled. In that same little book was Lowell’s naked poetry, and Thom Gunn, who wrote poems about bikers and Elvis Presley. I was listening to Elvis around the clock, but I never knew you could write poems about him. I was the prisoner of an older decorum, and these poets showed me the way out.

The question of influence leads into everything eventually. I could go on. But when I am asked if there is a Biggest Influence, I have gotten into the habit of just saying “Coleridge.” Why not? Most of us first encounter Coleridge through the “mystery poems,” those dream-like poems where we are taken on a journey (“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”) or we get a tour of a dream-like landscape (as in “Kubla Khan”). One reason why Coleridge was fond of the dream state was that it allowed him to focus entirely on one thing at a time. He said that in dreams he never felt as though he were thinking of one thing while looking at something else as he almost always did while conscious.

But the poems I mean are the so-called “conversation poems” of Coleridge, like “Frost at Midnight,” “The Aeolian Harp,” and—my favorite—“This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison.” These poems contain some amazing moves as his meditation shifts from the outside landscape (or room-scape) into the self, then back through memory, then off into some zones of wild speculation. The extended lyric was a perfect form to accommodate such musings. I learned from them how to write longer, more capacious poems and how to trust the movings of my own mind. Richard Hugo talks about this—about trusting your next thought simply because it is your next thought and nobody else’s. Trust the sequence. Here comes a thought. Write it down. These Coleridge poems have a very casual feel in the beginning, but they rise smoothly into the lofty. They seem to exemplify a piece of advice from Stephen Dobbyn’s: that is, if you get the reader to accept something simple in the beginning of the poem, he will be more inclined to accept something difficult later on. I find I have little tolerance for poems that begin with some extremely complicated chord. Better to begin like “Hot Cross Buns” and end like Debussy.

Of course, at some point, you start consciously picking your influences. You read knowing that you want to be influenced. Right now, I am reading Max Jacob. He was Picasso’s roommate for a while—imagine saying, “I’d like you to meet my roommate, Pablo”—and was killed by the Nazis, or they let him die of pneumonia at a way-station. I read him with the intention of getting under his influence. Or of just stealing his moves. Translating his language into my language.”

 I don’t think interpreting Billy Collins influences would get any harder, Billy Collins wouldn’t confirm the role of extensive reading or broad travel on his work, however I believe it would be fair to say that being a book worm has played a more pronounced role in his poems, considering poems like, ‘Aristotle, Lines composed over three thousand miles from Tintern Abbey or Picnic Lightning.’ In these poems you see the direct reference Billy Collins makes similar in Aristotle, ‘the first word of paradise lost on an empty page. Comparatively similar to Lines composed over three thousand miles from Tintern Abbey, where he refers to William Wordsworth work, Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey.

I hope this blog post was helpful in stressing out the profundity of Billy Collins, not only in his poems but also to an extent let all the information he sees or reads (even though he won’t directly point it out) influence his work. Both geographical travel and being a book-worm play an imperative role in his works. 

Billy Collins' s Identity Through His Influences

Billy Collins has often criticized influences in general, denouncing the way through them, authors are treated like “a baby found in a basket outside a hospital and trying to figure out who the parents are”

Nevertheless, like everybody else, he has admitted certain sways to have shaped his imagination from poetic to non-poetic ones.

John Clare

          

v  A Prominent 19^th Century English poet, the son of a farm laborer, who came to be known for his celebratory representations of the English countryside and his lamentation of its disruption.

v  Billy Collins loves him for his powerful writing of things such as nature and rural child hood. He has said of him “And it might be a literary love I learned from John Clare, the peasant poet who would walk around the countryside and look into birds’ nests and count the eggs and notice the speckles on the eggs, always with a sensitivity to these little creatures rustling through the grass.”

v  Also, Collins adores him for his defiance, much like his, to literary restriction. Clare’s formal education was brief and his class-origins were lowly. Clare resisted the use of the increasingly standardized English grammar and orthography in his poetry and prose, alluding to political reasoning in comparing 'grammar' (in a wider sense of orthography) to tyrannical government and slavery.

v  Collins mirrors this trait when he invented a Paradelle, a poetic form that parodies strict forms of poetry, particularly the Villanelle—a pastoral or lyrical poem of nineteen lines, with only two rhymes throughout, and some lines repeated.

v   His sample Paradelle "Paradelle for Susan" (c1997), was seemingly intentionally terrible, completing the final stanza with the line "Darken the mountain, time and find was my into it was with to to".

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

                         

v  An American poet, painter, liberal activist and author of poetry

v  Though imbued with the commonplace, Ferlinghetti’s poetry is grounded in lyric and narrative traditions.

v  Among his themes are the beauty of natural world, the tragicomic life of the common man, the plight of the individual in mass society, and the dream and betrayal of democracy.

v  Collins has been very affected by his simplicity, as truth to be told, he tends to narrate similar themes in his poems such as Fishing on the Susquehanna and The Blues.

Bridge Columns --Alan Truscott

v   Alan Truscott was a bridge player, writer, and editor. He wrote the daily bridge column for The New York Times for 41 years, from 1964 to 2005.

v  Billy Collins has confessed that he developed long ago an interest in bridge columns. The latter is a card game for four players, based on whist, in which one hand (the dummy) is exposed and the trump suit decided by bidding between the players.

v  When asked about Bridge Columns, Collins has stated “I don’t play bridge. I have no idea how to play bridge, but I always read Alan Truscott’s bridge column in the Times. I advise students to do the same unless, of course, they play bridge”

v  Furthermore, he has dwelt on the importance of Bridge Columns that is often forgotten “It’s pure language. It’s a jargon I’m exterior to, and I love reading it because I don’t know what the context is, and I’m just enjoying the language and the drama”.

v  He has even gone further to say it is “almost like when you hear two people arguing through a wall, and the wall is thick enough so you can’t make out what they’re saying, though you can follow the tone.”

v  Language such as “South won with dummy’s ace, cashed the club ace and ruffed a diamond”, Collins has said creates emotion and that “There’s always drama to it”

Warner Brothers—Cartoons

v  Collins named them as “very influential in the way my mind works”

v  He has admitted to have been “a Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes devotée through most of my childhood and adulthood”

v  He has also associated Cartoons with his sense of humor “a sense of animating the inanimate, a kind of speediness, an odd sense of possibility, an elastic world where things can change shape and you can pull a refrigerator out of your back pocket! Or get flattened by a steam roller and spring back into shape.”

v  And Collins has added that he loves that there’s no death in it “No death, no. There’s just bouncing and shape-changing”.

Latin

• An  ancient Italic language
• Billy Collins has confirmed Latin played a prominent role in his life “Another influence was learning the Latin responses of the mass as an altar boy.”
• He has explained that “[He] would study the Latin responses every evening. Of course, I didn’t know Latin. I was eleven or twelve years old and I was no John Stuart Mill. Underneath the Latin in red would be the phonetic spellings, so I was just memorizing syllables.”
• But He has said the language “brought me into the pure sound of the language, almost like nonsense, like jabberwocky, a delight in the sound of things.”

By Grace Mwizero

The Collins Playlist

Billy Collins and music.. Isn't that the perfect combination? I decided to take some time to research all of the music that Collins mentions in his poetry. I also took the liberty to link you guys to all of it. A real playlist of Billy Collins' music. ;) Enjoy!

From I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey's Version of 'Three Blind Mice'

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fOM08TXG8E - Art Blakey, 'Three Blind Mice'
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pR6gghkLCoQ - Freddie Hubbard, 'Blue Moon'

From Snow 

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jymS_7zyy7c - Thelonius Monk, 'Ruby My Dear'
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBBys5TLxCI - the Ronettes, 'Walking in the Rain' (Collins just mentions the artist, I took the liberty of choosing one of their songs.)
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MppGqwQdXY - George Thorogood and the Destroyers, 'Bad to the Bone' (once again Collins just mentions the artist)

From Another Reason Why I Don't Keep A Gun in the House

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3217H8JppI - Beethoven's 9th Symphony (Collins mentions him, so I took one of the most famous symphonies - because Collins was listening to a symphony)

From Sunday Morning with the Sensational Nightingales (He doesn't name any of these songs, I took the most listened to song from each)

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yhHIqsOanI&list=AL94UKMTqg-9BcJfPk1ifNHcqFyucBm1UV - The Five Blind Boys of Mississippi, 'Leaning on the Everlasting Arms'
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHIP7-KaP_Q&list=AL94UKMTqg-9CfGmlEzRH_5ceDGyvEHwMv - the Dixie Hummingbirds, 'Lord, I Want You to Help Me'
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ij3HxwmtdQ&list=AL94UKMTqg-9BKBKzejuCNRjvD6f2x-SZA - Soul Stirrers, 'Lord, Remember Me'
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zd7MrEOFcMs - the Swan Silverstones, 'Saviour Pass Me Not'
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L77wwwxvuKQ - The Sensational Nightingales, 'Somewhere to Lay my Head'

From The Best Cigarette (A beautiful poem, with a lovely piece in it - only the composer was named)

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yK6iAxe0oEc - Berlioz, 'Symphony Fantastique'

From Tuesday, June 4, 1991 (In this poem he only mentions the song, Nina Simone is just awesome so I picked this one)

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BguiWbW5j3Q - Nina Simone, 'You Don't Know What Love Is'

From Piano Lessons 

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTYtZa2XrDQ - Horace Silver, 'Filthy McNasty'
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUvIdEWiQms - Bill Evans Trio, 'It Might as Well Be Spring'

From Nightclub

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1T3s5QY-WI - Johnny Hartman, 'The Nearness of You'

From Some Final Words

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CTYymbbEL4 - Johan Strauss, 'The Blue Danube Waltz'

I hope these songs prickled your skin as much as they prickled mine. Some really lovely stuff in between there! I am really happy I spent my afternoon researching Billy Collins' taste in music.

The True Religion

Since the beginning of time, humans have relied on the teachings of different religions in order to explain their existence and to give them a purpose for living. People today, however, have an understanding of religion that is superficial because they rarely find complete satisfaction or definite purpose in the teachings of their faiths. Followers of these faiths think that religion can fix the problems in their lives without them having to try to fix the issues themselves. Humans seem to be lost without a solid spiritual understanding, and they resort to accumulating material items in order to find importance in their lives. Nonetheless, instead of focusing on material items, humans should interact in and with the “Natural World”. They need to enjoy their experiences but also not get too comfortable with nature and their lives because both are unpredictable.  Humans need to live in the moment and enjoy the spontaneous instances surrounding them both in nature and in relationships; because these are the components of a person’s life that truly makes them feel fulfilled and happy. In this essay I will be looking at how Billy Collins portrays religion.

 To start off, in Shoveling Snow with Buddha, Billy Collins uses a seemingly ordinary, simple, yet risky task in order to demonstrate how one can find spirituality, purpose, and enjoyment in everyday moments.   In the poem the tone is much more respectful. Collins shows his respect for men like Buddha through his literal language. “Even the season is wrong for him.” This is not implied by his serene expression", Buddha is symbolized as a selfless man who is shoveling a driveway that not even his. Buddha will not stop the job until the goal is reached; Collins is very admiral of this type of behavior. “He has thrown himself into shoveling snow / as if it were the purpose of his existence,” “and he inside his generous pocket of silence, “It is evident in the poem that Collins respects Buddha but, with the use of his language he makes the reader respect Buddha. Since Buddha is personified by all the natural good people in the world, the reader appreciates these kinds of people much more by the end of the poem.

The poem is 7 stanzas long, each stanza varying between five and ten lines in length. It depicts the narrator shoveling his driveway with Buddha, a very important figure in the Buddhist religion. The whole time, the narrator is talking to Buddha about nature and religion, but Buddha does not respond to anything he says and focuses solely on shoveling until the very end, when the religious figure asks to go inside and play cards.
     The poem doesn’t have any rhyme scheme or any form of iambic meter. He uses different rhetorical devices, including imagery, rhetorical questions and repetition. Collin’s use of rhetorical questions in the line “in all his manifestations, is it not warm or slightly humid?” is designed to highlight how out of place the Enlightened One is in such a cold environment. In classical Buddhist depiction, he is always shown in a warm and temperate area, but in the poem he is shoveling snow, yet appears as serene as ever, showing that from the start, Buddha is happy in this moment. This idea will come into play later when one looks into the meaning of the poem. His imagery also helps to show how calm the setting is. He uses words such as “fountain bursts” and “glittering” and “sudden clouds” to describe the snow. These words make the reader think of snow as beautiful and picturesque, instead of ugly and a nuisance, as some people might see it. He also uses repetition at the beginning of lines, starting many with the words “I say”. The decision to start lines with this phrase adds emphasis to how much the narrator talks in the poem, while Buddha says almost nothing. This also adds to the meaning of the poem.
In Shoveling Snow with Buddha, Collins uses a seemingly ordinary, simple, yet insecure projection in order to demonstrate how one can find spirituality, purpose, and enjoyment in everyday moments. Although this poetry involves the reader connecting with a spiritual being, it does not take place in a church or a temple, but instead in a driveway. However, in the poem Shoveling Snow with Buddha, Buddha is standing, bent, and is tossing the dry snow everywhere a peck/ of his bare, round shoulder.
    Personally, I think the poem is about people who talk too much about religion and aren't focusing on what they are currently doing. The narrator brags about how shoveling is “The true religion.” and says that he prefers it to “sermons in church”. Buddha meanwhile isn’t even acknowledging he is saying anything. Buddha knows that if it really is the true religion, it doesn’t need to be said. Buddha keeps this to himself and takes heart in focusing on his work, while the narrator almost sounds arrogant, telling the Buddha what religion is and isn’t. Buddha doesn’t act arrogant, yet does not confront the narrator, because he knows that it is better to just let others be, and remain happy in the present. The narrator realizes this near the end and as a result, is closer to enlightenment. Basically, the poem is about Buddha indirectly teaching a man about how to be happy in the moment.
Lines Lost Among Trees - I chose this poem, because of its amazing images that relate to the poetry that vanishes from the mind of Billy Collins. He talks about how it is a shattering experience to have worked and worked on a section of a poem, but to lose it right before reaching a pen and paper. He uses the images of “a handful of coins dropped through the grate of memory” and the “erasing a fantastic city of pencil,” among others to show how easily poetry can slip the mind, just like a dream or a “rehearsed speech.” OR religion, how people question religion or mock other religions just because they have different beliefs. I think that what Billy Collins wants his readers to know that there is no right or wrong religion. Just like the Buddha is Shoveling Snow with Buddha, the person was talking on and on and Buddha was quiet because he thought he doesn’t need to explain himself. Through the use of language Billy Collins can help you understand the ‘True meaning of Religion’, without questioning other beliefs, stating what is right or wrong.