Just Two Books by Former Poet Laureate Billy Collins

If you had uttered the word “POETRY” when I was a boy, I’d have probably run, sort of the way I would have reacted to the words FIRE or SNAKE or to the phrase WANNA KISS (though, as with poetry, I later came around regarding one of those, as well).

English (now called Language Arts) was the ONLY school subject I have ever flat out hated.

Most of that was due to grammar exercises (which seemed, at the time, to be an ingenious method of torture invented by adults especially for teens). Part of my aversion, however, was also due to that other devious cruelty called poetry. These were the sort of topics that could make a somewhat hyper person (meaning me, of course) start banging his forehead against text books and desks and lockers and (if we had grammar and poetry the same day) off the dull-colored cinder block walls of the back hallway.

It sure seemed as though the poems to which we were introduced were secret coded messages and we were supposed to decipher them without any cool decoder rings or fancy machines. It was like translating some long-lost foreign language that looked remotely familiar, sure, but made no sense at all.

Somehow, I managed to get through most of my undergraduate years avoiding anything that might have even been mistaken for an English class.

Eventually, however, I ran out of options. I was twenty-six. And my life changed forever.

Writers like Keats and Shelly and Wordsworth played a part in my conversion, as did Frost and Dickinson and Hughes. Even though I was finally able to decode most of the poems I read back then, even though I started dabbling at writing my own verse, it wasn’t until I read Sailing Alone Around the Room by Billy Collins that I realized poetry wasn’t just enlightening and inspiring, but it could actually be fun (to read and to write).

The Poetry Foundation says this of Collins: “Billy Collins is famous for conversational, witty poems that welcome readers with humor but often slip into quirky, tender or profound observation on the everyday, reading and writing, and poetry itself.”

I’ve come across a number of poets whose work I enjoy, poets like Tony Hoagland and David Kirby who employ humor and conversational tone, poets like Kay Ryan who use seeming simplicity to write profoundly, and others like JP Dancing Bear and Dorianne Laux and Annie Finch and Debra Kang Dean for a variety of reasons.

But, as a former non-reader, it’s the accessibility and the humor of Collins’ poetry, and his ability to illuminate the everyday, that always has him right there as one of my favorites.

Here’s a little homage to Billy Collins, a poem I wrote a couple years ago (in response, to some degree, to his poem “Introduction to Poetry”) that conveys my feelings about his poetry pretty accurately.

Dear Billy Collins

I can take a poem, shake it like a wet shirt,
hang it on a hook, catch the drips in a bowl
on the floor, wring it out, get what it holds.

Reading’s not the problem. What I need
is a how-to-poem, one that can help me
get at the rawness in my gut, let what I find
bleed out without creating such a mess.

Where do you get off, anyway, writing
a line that sails like a catamaran
carving itself effortlessly toward the edge
of truth? I watch it glide, follow it from the dock
where my foot is lodged in a hole in the planks.
I can even feel the breeze slapping the sails.

But when I write, words clunk
like bricks schlepped in a wheelbarrow
with a flat over a scraggy field of stone.

It must go back to my youth, when I wasted
all that time thumbing photographs in magazines.
I suppose when you were that age
you were off somewhere smoking
dictionaries: inhaling the potency of words,
savoring their taste as they wafted over
your tongue all gray and vaporous,
cataloging 
their weight, density, multifarious hues.

(Originally Published in 13th Warrior Review)

Watch Billy Collins read some of his poetry.