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.
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