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 19th 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
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