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.