An Evening with Billy Collins -- Point Loma Writer's Symposium By the Sea 2013

this ucsd-tv program is presented by university of california television like what you learn visit our website or follow us on Facebook and Twitter to keep up with the latest programs also make sure to check out and subscribe to our YouTube original channel you see TV prime available only on YouTube welcome to our 18th annual writers symposium by the sea at Point Loma Nazarene University I'm Dean Nelson on the journalism faculty at the University and it's a it's a huge honor to have Billy Collins with us this evening former US poet laureate author of ten published volumes of poems his poems have appeared in The New Yorker the Atlantic Rolling Stone and some other kind of places we're going to we're going to talk about tonight he is a poet like none you have ever experienced before in a live setting like this would you give a writer symposium welcome to Billy Collins well I feel the pressure is a little on now it's something you've never heard of great to be here and part of the symposium by the sea it's great to do anything by the sea even a symposium and Thank You Dean for for guiding me around so I'm going to read a few poems and then we're gonna have a little conversation and I'm gonna start with a couple of new poems and this one is is about what begins to be about a American natural phenomenon that some of you have heard of and maybe even witnessed and it's called the sandhill cranes of Nebraska too bad you weren't here six months ago was a lament I heard on my visit to Nebraska you could have seen the astonishing spectacle of the sandhill cranes thousands of them feeding and even dancing on the shores of the Platte River there was no point in pointing out the impossibility of my being there then because I happened to be somewhere else so I nodded and put on a look of mild disappointment if only to be part of the commiseration it was the same look I remember wearing about six months ago in Georgia when I was told that I had just missed the spectacular annual outburst of azaleas brilliant against the green backdrop of spring and the same in Vermont six months before that when I arrived shortly after the magnificent foliage had gloriously peaked mother nature as she is called having touched the hills with her many colored brush a phenomenon that occurs like the others around the same time every year when I am apparently off in another state stuck in a motel lobby with the local paper and a Styrofoam cup of coffee busily missing god knows what so lurking or even more overtly and pretty much every poem there's a little indebtedness because poems don't come out of nowhere and there's usually some trigger some preceding phenomenon in this case I don't think I would have written that poem were it not for a former poet laureate and a wonderful poet Howard Nemiroff and a while back a number of us were asked to a number of writers were asked to make up a new word and to someone who's going to compile a dictionary and they actually went ahead and did that of new words and the idea was not to be funny it was to actually find a hole in the language where a word should be and then and fill it with a made-up word but the best word in the in the dictionary I thought was by Howard Nemiroff and it was a verb transitive verb and the verb was to is a ly 8 and you can almost guess 2 is a liate someone means to needlessly commiserate with some visitor about a local attraction that they just missed by arriving too late or will miss because they're leaving too early so you have all been Azalea today I'm sure so this poem is this next poem is the transition here is that this poem as an example of the greatest most overt indebtedness a poem can exhibit and that occurs when a poet wants to write a version of a particular poem by someone else and there's a little protocol involved in that as you use the same title as there as the poem you're imitating and then under that you use the expression after with the author's name so you say after Whitman or you know after matthew arnold and i wanted to write a poem an imitation if you will where a version of a poem by the chinese poet Li Po and his poem is called drinking alone so I wrote drinking alone on a piece of paper and under it I wrote after Li Po and then I got completely tangled up in the expression after Li Po so this is as far as it God drinking alone after Li Po this is not after Li Po the way the state is after me for neglecting to pay all my taxes nor the way I am after the woman in front of me on the long line at the post office Li Po I am NOT saying after you as I stand holding open one of the heavy glass doors that divide the centuries in a long corridor of glass doors no the only way this is after you is in the way they say it's just one thing after another like the way I will pause to raise a glass of wine to you after I finish writing this poem so let me get back to sitting in the wind alone among the pines with a pencil in my hand after all you had your turn and mine will soon be done then someone else will sit here after me mm thank you and just to underscore the fact that poems can have very common origins and also I do in this film what I do in several films which I sort of include the trigger of the poem and include the way it started for me so as not to get too far ahead of anybody and the poem is called cheerio is one bright morning in a restaurant in Chicago as I waited for my eggs and toast I opened through the Tribune only to discover that I was the same age as Cheerios indeed I was a few months older than Cheerios for today the newspaper announced was the 70th birthday of Cheerios whereas mine that occurred earlier in the year already I could hear them whispering behind my stooped and threadbare back why that dude is older than Cheerios the way they used to say why that's as old as the hills only the hills are much older than Cheerios or any American breakfast cereal and more noble and enduring are the hills I surmised as a bar of sunlight illuminated my orange juice thanks a lot and here's a poem that is a kind of addresses a language tick you know something that a way of phrasing things that infects the language and takes over and it's called after the funeral when you told me you needed a drink drink and not just a drink like a drink of water I steered you by the elbow into the next bar which turned out to be a real bar bar dim and nearly empty with little tables in the back where we drank and agreed that the funeral was a real funeral funeral complete with a mass incense and tons of eulogies you know I always considered Tom a real friend friend you said lifting your drink drink to your lips and I agreed that tom was much more than just an ordinary friend and we concurred that Angela's black dress was elegant but not like elegant elegant just elegant enough and after a few hours when the bartender brought yet another round of whiskey's to our table in the corner we recognized by his apron and his mighty girth that he was more than just a bartender a true bartender bartender was what he was we decided with a respectful clink-clink of our drink drinks amber in a of afternoon light thank you I have a book coming out in in October and this I'm gonna read the title poem of the book and it's called aim the book is called aimless love and other poems but in this case it's just aimlessly aimless love this morning as I walked along the lakeshore I fell in love with a wren and later in the day with a mouse the cat had dropped into the dining room table in the shadows of an autumn evening I fell for a seamstress still at her machine in the tailor's window and later for a bowl of broth steam rising like smoke from a naval battle this is the best kind of love I thought without recompense without gifts or unkind words without suspicion or silence on the telephone the love of the chestnut the jazz cap in one hand on the steering wheel no lust no slam of the door the love of the miniature orange tree the clean white shirt the hot evening shower that highway that cuts across Florida no waiting no huff eNOS or rancor just a twinge every now and then for the Wren who had built her nest on a low branch overhanging the water and for the dead now is still dressed in his light brown suit but my heart is always propped up in a field on its tripod ready for the next arrow after I carried the mouse by the tail to a pile of leaves in the woods I found myself standing at the bathroom sink gazing down affectionately at the soap so patient and soluble so at home and its pale green soap dish I could feel myself falling again as I felt it's turning in my wet hands and caught the scent of lavender and stone thank you and here's a poem whose subject is adolescence which I don't think adolescents existed until 1955 with rebel with had a cause and now it can't with grad to the help of graduate school can be extended into your 30s we're very flexible about how we look at age now someone told me recently that one's 70s is the last decade of middle age so and this is a address to someone in particular it's its title to my favorite 17 year old high school girl do you realize that if you had started building the Parthenon on the day you were born you would be all done and only one more year of course you couldn't have done that alone so never mind you're fine just as you are you are loved for simply being yourself but did you know that at your age Judy Garland was pulling down a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a picture Joan of Arc was leading the French army to victory and Blaise Pascal had cleaned up his room no wait I mean he had invented the calculator of course there will be time for all that later in your life after you come out of your room and begin to blossom or at least pick up all your socks for some reason I keep remembering that Lady Jane Grey was queen of England when she was only 15 but then she was beheaded so never mind her as a role model a few centuries later when he was your age franz schubert was doing the dishes for his family but that did not keep him from composing to symphonies for operas and to complete masses as a youngster but of course that was in Austria at the height of romantic lyricism not here in the suburbs of Cleveland frankly who cares if Annie Oakley was a crack at 15 or if maria callas debuted as Tosk at 17 we think you are special by just being you playing with your food and staring into space but by the way I lied about Schubert doing the dishes but that doesn't mean he never helped out around the house bless her little heart here's something here's something poets get I don't think musicians or playwrights or painters get this but poets get this all the time and it's called the suggestion box it all began fairly early in the day at the coffee shop as it turned out when the usual waitress said I bet you're gonna write a poem about this after she had knocked a cup of coffee into my lab then later in the morning I was told by a student that I should write a poem about the fire drill that was going on as we all stood on the lawn outside our building in the afternoon a woman I barely knew said you could write a poem about that pointing to a dirigible that was passing overhead and if all that were not enough a friend turned to me as we walked past a man his face was covered with tattoos and said I see a poem coming why is everyone being so helpful I wonder that evening by the shore of a lake maybe I should write a poem about all the people who think they know what I should be writing poems about it was just then in the fading light that I spotted a pair of ducks emerging from a cluster of reeds to paddle out to open water the female glancing back over her russet shoulder just in time to see me searching my pockets for a pen I knew what she cracked with a bit of a Brogue but who can blame you for following your heart she went on now would go write a lovely poem about me in the mr. it's crazy right it's a little well let's get right to a couple of dog poems here before we again I refer this these are the two poems spoken in the voice of dogs or you can imagine actually written by dogs if you like and this one and this one a dog is the dog is contemplating one of the one of the facts of dog ownership although ownership always struck me as an insufficient word to describe to describe that relationship it's sort of a co-ownership and it's called a dog on his master as young as I look I am growing older faster than he seven to one is the ratio they tend to say whatever the number I will pass him one day and take the lead the way I do on our walks in the woods and if this ever manages to cross his mind it would be the Swedish shadow I have ever cast on snow or grass now you made a little sound there I don't think there's a word for it but but that's the problem with writing what I mean I sometimes tell students in poetry workshops you know that that I said why don't you have a dog coming to the poem I mean they would just be a relief from the self absorption for a few minutes and dogs just tend to cheer things up but the danger is that any poem about a house pet can get extremely sentimental and produce that sound so so here at the little task I set out for myself was to write a poem about a dog that would that would not make you make that sound so it's called the revenant it's a little longer than the that poem but not much the revenant I am the dog you put to sleep as you like to call the needle of oblivion come back to tell you this simple thing I never liked you when I lift your face I thought of biting off your nose when I watched you telling yourself dry I wanted to leap and unmanned you with a snap I resented the way you moved your lack of animal grace the way you would sit in a chair to eat and napkin in your lap and knife in your hand I would have run away but I was too weak a trick you taught me while I was learning to sit and heal and greatest of insults shake hands without a hand I admit the sight of the leash would excite me but only because it meant I was about to smell thing as you had never touched you do not want to believe this but I have no reason to lie I hated the car hated the rubber toys disliked your friends and worse your relatives the jingling of my tags drove me mad you always scratched me in the wrong place all I ever wanted from you was water and food and my fret met my metal balls while you slept I watched you breathe as the moon rose in the sky it took all of my strength not to raise my head and howl now I am free of the collar free of the yellow raincoat monogrammed sweater the absurdity of your lawn and that is all you need to know about this place except what you're already supposed and are glad it did not happen sooner that everyone here can read and write the dogs and poetry the cats and all the others in prose so that's where I stand on the cat dog here's a poem is a sonnet and it's a it's about the the kind of national phenomenon of suddenly emerged the emergence of condominium developments or gated communities and fair enough there they are but what struck me as someone who's interested in language is that they're always named stuff like deer Hollow and Beaver meadow and stuff like that and it occurred to me that you know these are precisely the animals that were driven out of their habitat in order to create these these housing areas so so all the signs then took on a sort of sad undertone and so the poem is called the golden years that speaker is retired fellow a widower in fact and write the golden years all I do these drawn-out day is to sit in my kitchen at pheasant ridge where there are no pheasants to be seen and last time I looked no Ridge I could drive over to quail Falls and spend the day there playing bridge but the lack of a Falls and the absence of quail wouldn't only remind me of pheasant Ridge I know a widow at Fox Run and another with a condo at smokey ledge one of them smokes and neither can run so I'll stick to the pledge I made to midge who frightened the Fox and bulldoze the ledge I asked in my kitchen that pheasant Ridge thank you here's two little poems I was that little poem I read about the language tick and is this is a very nine line poem about another kind of thing we find in circling in the language it's called oh my god and the narrator you'll see is extremely kind of boring yesterday naive person oh my god not only in church and nightly by their bed sides two young girls pray these days wherever they go prayer is woven into their talk like a bright thread of awe even at the pedestrian mall outbursts of praise spring unbidden from their glossy lips and here's a tiny poem for a line poem I guess when I get a book of poems not like most people I rarely or never read a book of poems from front to back I'm kind of treated more like a flipbook of some kind and I'm usually looking for short poems because I love them and I think it's a test and it's also this is the kind of poem that means nothing without the title and the title is divorce once two spoons in bed now tie and Forks across a granite table and the knives they have hired that's a good sound right that's another kind of sound okay well we have time for a couple more poem called grave grave what do you think of my new glasses I asked as I stood under a shade tree before the join grave of my parents and what followed was a long silence that descended on the rows of the dead and on the fields and the woods beyond one of the 100 kinds of silence according to the Chinese believed each one distinct from the others but the difference is being so faint that only a few special monks were able to tell them all apart they make you look very scholarly I heard my mother say once I lay down on the ground and pressed an ear into the soft grass then I rolled over and pressed my other ear to the ground the ear my father likes to speak into but he would say nothing and I could not find a silence among the 100 Chinese silences that would fit the one that he created even though I was the one who had just made up the business of the 100 Chinese silences the Silence of the night boat and the silence of the Lotus cousin - the silence of the temple bell only deeper and softer like petals at its farthest edges thank you and here's a another sort of tiny love poem called Carrie just the verb Carrie I want to carry you and for you to carry me the way voices are said to carry over water just this morning on the shore I could hear two people talking quietly in a rowboat on the far side of the lake they were talking about fishing then one changed the subject and I swear they began talking about you and this is a poem called nostalgia and then I'll probably just read one more and you remember the 20th century or some parts of it I'm assuming so much happened and one of the one of the things that happened in the in the 20th century is that we got into the habit of referring to the past in decades so we'd say very knowledgeably of course well that was like 50s or you know that was a 70s thing well then it seemed that you could throw morality out the window as long as you realized what decade it was so come on it's the 80s you know and the impression was that you know at every New Year's Eve like everything changed you know standards morality metaphors music so and the thing was we were I always felt we were we were supposed to feel nostalgic that was the emotion about the passing of these decades as if we wanted to be stuck in one in some kind of eternal decade loop so this plays off that and that's called again nostalgia remember the 1340s we were doing a dance called the catapult you always were brown the color craze of the decade and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon and at night we would play a game called find the cow everything was hand lettered back then not like today where has the summer of 1572 gone brocade and sonnet marathon's were the rage we used to dress up in the flags of rival baron ease and conquer one another and cold rooms of stone out on the dance floor we were all doing the struggle well your sister practiced the Daphne all alone in her room we borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang these days language seems transparent a badly broken code the 1790s will never come again childhood was big people would take walks to the very tops of hills and write down what they saw in their journals without speaking our callers were high our hats were extremely soft we would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs it was a wonderful time to be alive or even dead I am very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821 Europe trembled while we sat still for our portraits and I would love to return to 1901 if only for a moment time enough to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941 where at least let me recapture the serenity of last month when we picked berries and glided through afternoons in a canoe even this morning would be an improvement over the present I was in the garden then surrounded by the hum of bees and the Latin names of flowers watching the early light flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks as usual I was thinking about the moments of the past letting my memory rush over them like water rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream I was even thinking a little about the future that place where people are doing it dance we cannot imagine a dance his name when we can only guess thank you so much I'll do one more poem home came about when I was looking through the notebooks of Robert Frost and like most or journals and like most of them I mean they were everything was there but it was not of equal interest but what they're just scribblings and stuff like that but also drafts of some famous poems but one little notation caught my eye and in the corner he had written I have I have always envied the four moon planet at the time I didn't even know there was a formalin planet but apparently Jupiter has four moons or maybe 27 months I'm not sure but but Frost I was curious about why he envied that the four moon planet maybe he was thinking of the song what a little moonlight can do and became curious about what a lot of moonlight might be capable of but wouldn't this be too much of a good thing and what if you couldn't tell them all apart and they always rose together like pale quadruplets entering a living room yes there would be enough light to read a book or write a letter at midnight and if you drank enough tequila you might see eight of them roving brightly above but think of the two lovers on a beach his arm around her bare shoulder thrilled at how close they were feeling tonight while he gazed up at one moon and she another that you grew up with your mom reciting verses poems through throughout throughout your childhood right yeah well she didn't really recite them because it wasn't like a terribly literate family I was the first one to go to college in the family but she did she grew up in rural Canada in Ontario and if you know she was born in 1901 and she lived to be 97 so just about covered the 20th century that we were just referring to but she he'd met when she grew up memorization was a very legitimate way to present poetry and unfortunately that's kind of been lost but she just knew a lot of poems so it wouldn't be like the poetry hour and she get up and on the table and recite but almost any occasion she would have some lines for often from Shakespeare if we were cold if some friend of hers seemed ungrateful or so in other words poetry was sort of threaded into her talk and and that way even as a child I recognize them when she started speaking that way it was a different kind of talk or it wasn't talk it was something different from talk and something better than talk so and I could kind of hear modulate I don't even know if I knew if was poetry but I just knew that she would talk funny you know yeah certain way because that she'd come up with these images that she you know wouldn't would not be part of her normal speech do you assume that that had some kind of a marking on you of how you started thinking maybe in Cadence's or in rhythms or an image no it's hard it's hard to say I mean a lot of this you know kind of constructing how you became what you are is very much an act of fiction you might say I mean you could have make it up as you go along but I mean Seamus Heaney mentioned something that I think was just as formative for me and that is as an altar boy in Catholic school memorizing the Latin responses to the mass and I didn't know what I was saying except I mean I knew like you know Dominus and a few other words but in Latin but basically I was just memorizing syllables you know sushi pyaar Tommy knows soccer uh PG and like that and he talks about and I would echo that that it was an interesting exposure to kind of nonsense in a way it was pure sound and without without the meaning and that certainly is a component in in poetry just that you that you go by the ER you write by the ear I have a poem in which I mentioned going to camp in the Adirondacks and a couple of times people have said well you know come up after and say what what I went to camp and yet our what camp did you go to and I said well actually I went to camp in the Catskills but Adirondacks sounds better than Catskills I mean Adirondacks sounds it sounds almost Italian right Adirondacks but Catskills is like blah blah it's like it's a it's a sponsor spondee right so and there's lots of instances and Shakespeare particularly were where sound triumphs over sins and then you go to graduate school you get a PhD and what you called obscure poetry and then you said you wrote obscure poems four years after all I did I mean I I don't know why but I wanted desperately to be a poet ever since I was in high school I just thought maybe I thought it was just a cool thing to do maybe if I thought about it but also I mean I'd love to read and I love the solitude of reading and writing seemed to provide the same kind of solitude only you were now on the giving part of it instead of the receiving end so it was though that that was a sort of switch but I didn't you know what I understood about poetry at that time was that it was it was quite hard to because I did I wanted to be a modern poet a living poet and it was hard to understand but you could tell that the speaker was miserable that you could understand and often not much more and that this appealed to you well it being a poet appealed to me and I was willing to do anything to be a poet so yeah you know so I wrote obscure poems and which gave off whips of misery even even though I was relatively happy as a young person but if that's what it took I was willing to go the way you thought yeah the price so I committed all those offenses and and I'm really struck by some of the the early journals that you were published in the flying faucet well I just made that out seriously because that sounded better than Catskills was my giving examples of obscure journalism so so boink magazine link no link did exist we believe that you can't you can't tell but yeah yeah I was getting published in obscure journals I didn't care I mean at that time I didn't care where I got published so and if you don't care about that it's quite easy to get published you have no standards publication but it's just a thrill to get published sure sure and and then you sent some poems hoping to get published to a review at the University of Arkansas to the press actually yeah yeah yeah to the University of Arkansas press and and you say that that editor did you a great service by putting a paperclip around some of them yeah that was well that was Miller Williams was the the director of the University of Arkansas press and he's a wonderful poet and it has never gotten the acclaim that he really deserves and Lucinda Williams what is his daughter and but now he's her father since she's more famous than he is but and he's also forgotten largely that Maga tonight he was he was President Clinton's second inaugural poet because Clinton when he was to his credit when he was governor of Arkansas was very supportive not only of the university but of the University of Arkansas press which had a good poetry list and he was supported that and Miller Williams so it was sort of a he chose a native son to come and deliver the address but I sent I hadn't had a book published so I sent a real book so I sent a manuscript off to him because a friend of mine Ron Kirk II and whose of California poet had gotten the book published there and I and our poems were a little similar in an tenor and and voice and humor I guess so I gave it a try and Miller William sent back the poems with a very short note and he had put a paper clip around about seventeen out of the 50 or so poems I'd sent out and the little note said I put a paper clip around these poems and these are quite good poems and he said the other poems don't live up to those poems so he was telling me that some of my poems didn't live up to a standard I had set for myself there was something about those seventeen yeah the people that he believed in what was it what was he different about him I think I think there were a little less tricky there are less jokey and there were a little less I mean I was made a lot of offenses being just too clever for a my own good I think and and and some of those poems got very short because they would just shut down with the kind of punchline and the others had a little more expansiveness to them and and room in them they were a little less boxy so so that paper clip was really worth an MFA to me because I then set out to please this man I didn't meet him until like ten years like there but for the next year or two maybe I've wrote poems I through all the other bums out and I saw just what he meant I couldn't quite articulate it but and I spent a year's trying to please this guy and and writing poems that were as good as the 17 and I did and so he published my book because he said if you can write a whole bunch of poems like those I'll publish your book and so that's all I needed yeah well yeah I'm off to the races so I read somewhere that you sent some poems to poetry magazine when I was 18 or 17 yeah God got rejected yeah and how long did you wait before you send it anymore to them over 25 years I think yeah when I was ready yeah I got actually I got a nice letter back from Henry Rago was the editor of poetry magazine and I was a high school senior and he actually wrote a nice letter encouraging me not to send in more poems it's very clear about that but to to continue you know and it was something like 25 years later that I thought I was ready and sure enough I was you've said that you wrote bad poetry until you were in your 40s well no until my mid-30s I guess oh they weren't published till I was 40 but I I mean I started writing I started figuring out something about writing when I was in my mid-30s or so or late 30s would you figure out I figured out how to write the poems that I just read okay yeah whatever I'm doing there I'm that's what I figured out isn't this because part of what you thought you understood about poetry was that you saw value in difficulty yes if it was incomprehensible then that must have been a great poem yeah that's right and nobody agreed with that no so aya dared to be clear I mean being clear being clear is the real risk in poetry I think many people talk about it either she writes or he writes very risky poetry and never really bought that word because you're just sitting there I don't know what you're risking but but I think the real if there is a risk the risk is to be clear because then you're you're out in the open they you know people the reader knows what you're doing whereas if if you use obscurity as a kind of camouflage you become kind of unassailable I mean you can't be pinned down so yeah I wrote and I started also I started admitting some of my personality into the poems which I was repressing and that personality was someone who was a lot happier than this miserable persona that I would had earlier and also had a sense of humor I always liked humor and my father was sort of the the humor element of the family and but as we know humor was was was something he didn't want to do in poetry because it was it was too frivolous it was too light and and if you wrote poetry that was humorous you were you were sent to this kind of ghetto called light verse where I mean I loved Ogden Nash and I wrote a very serious essay about Ogden Nash but that's where you would be put he was not he was not taken seriously and you know what happened can I give a short history of humor and poetry of course you're asking me well you know I know your time is precious I do have other appointments I know you parked in a 15 minutes bar oh yeah actually he's right but well you know I mean there's there's there was always humor humor was a essential element our part of literature and you can go back to Roman comedies and and then up to I mean Chaucer's some of the tales are hilarious and Shakespeare wrote comedies and then we have like met at the metaphysical poets who whose poems depend on the deployment of wit and then we move into a Gustin satire that's having fun laughing at other people and then you get to the Romantic poets and that's rapport that's where humor dies out because the romantics took themselves in in a more serious way Byron's not a real you know we leave him aside but some kind of deal I think was struck in the in the around 1800 or 1790s and the deal was these Romantic poets got together in a room and closed the door and they said here's what we're gonna do we're gonna get rid of sex and humour and we're gonna substitute landscape so so when you read about those rolling hills well nobody really reading it's not verbal I don't think it's repressed sexuality but it's and and sex recovered in a kind of kinky way with the Victorians but but humor really was not allowed back into poetry until I would say reckon 1950s or 60s with people like Philip Larkin and and then other people we mentioned Ron Padgett and Kenneth Koch and people from the New York school and also the California poets like Ron curtsy and Gerald Laughlin and and those guys but then it was okay I mean it seemed that I didn't need to hide that it was it could be an element in poetry mm-hm it just seems like you write about real stuff that all of us see the sky boats on a river a barking dog eating a piece of fish listening to jazz this is this is all stuff that we do too and when we do it is just dull and routine and when you talk about it it just seems really profound so art so here's my question are all of your moments profound I believe for him are you just that cut that guy I have a special gift that's rare but not all of them are I mean for instance there are no moments here maybe maybe later but well I think it's you know it's sort of a matter of if you're if you're a writer if you're an artist if you're a writer you know one takes on a kind of not a Berisha sput a kind of exploitive review of reality I mean because you're always looking for potential material you're looking for something they're right about and because there are only a few subjects in poetry four or five you know Willa I guess Willa Cather said the fiction writer she said there are only like four or five human stories and she said but and this is a direct quote she said we we keep retelling them as desperately as if we'd never heard them before I and someone said all science fiction is definitely two stories either we go there or they come here so so as a as a poet one is just if there are these four or five rooms of emotional content one is just looking for metaphoric ingress 'as you're just looking for metaphoric ways in yeah so aging would be one of the five rooms so you know when I read the Tribune that I was the same age as Cheerios that seemed like it an ample a ripe opportunity to enter the room of Aging and because one of the themes of poetry is we're not getting any younger yeah a lot of people have compared you to Robert Frost and you had you actually had dinner with him lunch with him yeah lunch tell us tell us about that well I didn't roll time we didn't speak well he was invited to my I went to a Jesuit college in the 60s and he was invited to to read and speak at my college and he was quite old he would be dead within three or four years I think and but I was on the literary magazine so just as a student representative a few of us were asked were invited to have lunch with him in this sort of little faculty or priestly lunchroom but it was kind of it was made clear not through words but through looks that we weren't to speak because it could only go downhill I mean so you just sat there and watched him eat the reputation of the college was at stake in jeopardy yeah we basically he was in he was talking with a few Jesuits at the head of the table and yet we just watched watched him eat and or it were tried not to watch him II was more like it we didn't want to stare at him but I did technically I had lunch with him yeah there's nothing kind of lunch you wouldn't imagine having with anybody about you wrote a poem about splitting wood in the winter and the first line of that poem is frost covered this decades ago and frost will cover it again tonight and I assume you're talking about the weather but you're also nodding at him right yeah well I you know Eliot talks about this and others that every every major poet frost certainly Yeats they they take up a space that no one else can occupy anymore it's sort of like they control a certain ground and it's like you can't have two people on the same base at the same time and I think like the Swan I don't think you can write about a Swan without without Yeats in the bet he's like he did the Swan he's this one and and and this poem came about I mean I won't be elaborate but I have a house and ended up above New York City and there's woods in the back and I love splitting wood and it's a great exercise and they say you know he who or she who splits wood you warm yourself twice you warm yourself when you're splitting the wood and then you are warmed later by that which you are splitting and I thought well again I'm looking for a metaphor and I thought there must be some metaphoric possibilities in splitting wood but I thought I thought well that's Frost I mean you can't you can't go into that area it's like police tape around the woods because that's Frost's area and they and then it just it says are bugged me and finally I wrote this poem called splitting wood but I I nodded to Frost in the first sent me it starts capitalized it's the first word in the sentence so it actually says frost frost covered this decades ago and frost will cover it again tonight the leafy disarray of these woods and then it just goes on but but I was nodding to frost but yeah so I mean that that's sort of a kind of a negative influence you know that you call taboo yeah that you feel you're trespassing or it's like it's like a cover of song when someone's covering someone else's song right and doing a cover of a song that that person possesses you know like a like a great like a like a view saying I left my heart in San Francisco I mean you're covering Tony Bennett now do you want to cover him disrespectfully do you want - is it an homage to him are you doing misinterpreting his you know there's lots of types of relationships you can have with the earlier the predecessor mm-hmm so it so it complicates writing if you read you know I mean if you don't if you know read you are immune from any of these anxieties so all right so how big of an influence on your poetry is Bugs Bunny well large I mean I mean your what are you basing this on well I'm basing this on a statement that you said you're more influenced by Bugs Bunny than you are Emilie dick okay that was a rare moment that well I mean briefly I was asked a number of writers were asked by the Wall Street Journal three years ago to come up to write something about some obsession or habit or odd thing about themselves that readers would be kind of surprised to find out so Junot Diaz for example wrote about his obsession with that video game is it grand theft auto or ground something rather and he wrote about how he just couldn't stop playing it so I wrote an essay about how one of my influences was Warner Brothers cartoons Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies and how it was not a Disney guy at all because Disney was very bourgeois I mean they're married does Mickey and Minnie and Donald and Daisy you know it's just it's too settled but there could there could be no mrs. Daffy Duck you know I mean he's beyond the the conventions of marital love but I did talk about how how just it really helped my imagination to be in a kind of very pliable world where everything kind of morphed and you know you could you could pull a refrigerator out of your pants or something you know and you weren't even wearing pants but just that crazy pliable world what I thought it was probably had some influence on just the plasticity of the imagination and how and how the laws of gravity are suspended quite nicely as they can be in poetry and so so the day it came out that they the Wall Street Journal just as Saturday you know and they just did this incredible graphics job you know so on the front page of The Wall Street Journal up for the the banner is right although there were all these Looney Tunes characters and they're all in drag because they're just his muses and Bugs Bunny was a famous crossdresser anyway but I held this thing in my hand I said I will I can die a happy man I put Daffy Duck on the cover of The Wall Street Journal above the above the the banner you know there's so much vivid imagery in what you write and I and I just wonder is I is this just one of your gifts or do you really work at images like this this one from the poem Aristotle you've got this line disappointment on shoulders his knapsack here and pitches his ragged tent that's that's just that's a beautiful line so all right you did that just pop out or did you really work at that you know I don't remember writing much to tell you the truth I mean I don't remember where that came from I don't know I mean I think Michael Longley the Irish poet was asked where do your ideas come from or what are your images come from and he said well if I knew I would go there and I wouldn't come back I don't know it's sometimes it's stuff written in a notebook you know I mean taking notes but but they're it's um you know a knapsack in a tent it's just kind of if you were to picture disappointment as an allegorical character you know what would he look like in this case he's sort of uh he's a hiker I don't know why though but you know you just go with these things out of instinct I mean it doesn't you don't want to make perfect sense kind of like tonight yeah so so you've you've talked about poets being the kind of people who look out of a window and fiction writers looking in a window can you explain that well I just I think if you're writing fiction or plays you have to be extremely interested in other people and if you're writing poetry you don't have to that's not necessary you have to be you have to be interested in yourself and I'd so I as a if you picture this architectural II yeah fiction writers are so curious about the private not just domestic but sexual and psychological lives of others that they can be pictured peering into the windows of strangers or of other people and where I would picture the poet as looking out his or her window at the world and saying this is the way I see the world you know I like you know I went out and I saw all these daffodils you know there's nobody else in that poem but Wordsworth and I I was saying this class or session with students we had yesterday which was really enjoyable that I try to have I have very few people in my poems except me the dog is there occasionally but and in love poems there's a another person there but usually there's nobody else and my parents are in my poem sometimes I couldn't write poem my parents were never in my poem still after they were dead then then I could write about them for some reason other but but I said that if that the fewer people you have in your poems the more alone you are with the reader and I want to be completely alone with the reader I think of the poems I mean I'm happy to get up and read poems and perform them and or whatever but I I'm writing in in in silence for for a person it was got a book in her hand or his hand and I want to be very alone with that person I don't want to talk about mom and dad or my uncle or I actually don't even want to talk about anything about myself I don't want to talk I don't want to talk autobiographical II because I don't have an autobiographical persona you know you can read you could read all these books and you wouldn't you wouldn't know much about me you would know about this persona who is who's not me but a kind of refinement or an improvement definite improvement over me but he is not burdened with a job or family problems or or that kind of things he's more of a kind of aspect tutorial figure he's just looking at something you know out of nowhere but he doesn't bring a knapsack full of autobiographical baggage with him and unloaded on the reader because he assumes that the reader does not want that to be unloaded on him well here's a line from a poem though where I'm wondering if you are revealing something about who you are so this is from your poem vocation where you're looking at constellations in the in the night sky you have this line that you're reminded after many jumbled days and nights of my true vocation keeping an eye on things whether they existed or not recumbent under the random stars so I'm wondering are you telling us this this is your vocation is 2mr kind of bear witness to these well that's his vocation I mean and mine partially I mean that's our jobs as poets is to is to observe and to report and to I mean a lot of my my wife used to criticize me about this that some of the oppose my character is lying down you know and she said why don't you get him to do something it's like he's like these people in Hopper paintings they're just kind of immobilized but he's he's often like looking at the ceiling or looking at the window but on a couch or in a field and but you know I my persona is is fashioned out of the cloth of English romantic poetry basically I mean in English romantic poetry you have this figure of the the the wanderer the dawdler the the daydreamer you know a man who he walks through a landscape you know there's nothing to do but walk through a landscape and he sits by a wayside bench and he falls into some reverie or speculation and then that's the poem that's that's pretty much it that's all that's required and so I just love that whole idea of endless time and staring at the constellations or looking at a tree or something that that whole sense of slowing down and Max Max bierbaum said that he because he was a great champion of wasting time which is really not wasting time it's spending it well he said the the ant sets an example for us all but it is not a good one you you have some harsh things to say about how poetry is taught and you've said that high school is where poetry goes to die and and you even have a poem about this you want to respond to that or you want me to well I mean if you have the right teachers who are teaching the right poetry doesn't have to die there but I mean I'm as guilty of this as anybody but I think one of the reasons that people lose interest in high school is not the fault of teachers suggests that they're it's the fault of adolescents I mean it's it's because I mean one of the things about adolescents is at least as I experienced it was one is interested in acceleration and speed whether it's car speed or whether it's today it's computer speed or instant texting or messaging it's all you wanted everything has to get like go faster and poetry obviously is an appeal to slow down and that's I mean one reason poetry comes in lines is that the effect of that is that it it asks you not to rush through it as you could with prose stop here and come back in the poem every time the poem does not go out to the end of the line the poet is therefore kind of prose avoidance system you know we have to stop it before we turn into journalists or something ah careful careful there but but so the line ends and then you go back in the poem so that the the shape of the poem is always telling you come back come back in come back into the body of the poem rejoin the the field of words that are in this poem and that's that can a powerful nonlinear recur kind of recurrent thing that's going on in palms well and you and you have a poem called introduction to poetry which is sort of a zero dark thirty of poem analysis right where you talk about torturing the meaning out of it yeah and are you aware that some academic type has actually done an academic analysis of that poem no I saw it online it is yeah she killed it yeah yeah she totally killed it well because because your point in that in that poem is that the poet has obviously failed to communicate right and so we have to pound some serve a meaning out of it well I guess this check it's just trying to get at or make fun of the tendency in classrooms to put an incredible influences on interpretation now what does the poem mean and as I was sort of saying yesterday in poetry the language is used in such a way that it does not really want to be brushed aside in order to find meaning the language resists that kind of it should resist put puts resistance up against that kind of dismissive substitution and for for substituting meaning for what the poem is actually saying and when what Frost was asked at one point to explain one of us poem one of his poems he said oh you want me to say it worse you know I mean I just said it that's what it means and to start talking about it would be to produce an inferior to inferior text and not only that but you wouldn't know if that was if his explanation was true or not then you'd have someone interpreting his his interpretation and then you just have this Hall of Mirrors of interpretations after interpretation so it does seem like that's a lot of schools do that to literature to poetry instead of literature we call it textual analysis you know we call it all these all of these things and it seems like it just takes the fun out of reading well also it just there are so many pleasures that don't require teachers and I think I mean not all those pleasures but literary pleasures I mean I wrote an article once called poetry pleasure and the hedonist reader and I have I think it's maybe seven pleasures that you get out of poetry and and then like the pleasure of metaphoric connection the pleasure pleasure of imaginative travel the pleasure of rhythm the pleasure of sound and then the seventh and last pleasure is the pleasure of meaning because I I mean I when I went to graduate school I mean if you don't have a head for challenging text there's no point in being in graduate school I mean you could look at my copy of the collected Wallace Stevens or or Piers Plowman and you will find you know just marginal comments all over the place my real taste for it but I know right that way and and I feel that the teacher kind of almost imposes him or herself between the the poem and the student by choosing poems that require interpretation because of you choose poems that that don't require your intermediacy then there's no class really and this is what you're trying to do though with your poetry 180 ya program right yeah tell us about it well poetry 180 was simply a program for American high schools it was me finding 180 poems when I was poet laureate and putting them on a website attached to the Library of Congress website with some instructions for teachers and the idea the suggestion was why don't have a poem read every day in high school over a loudspeaker or an assembly whenever usually high schools have a time when everyone hears the same thing just have someone read one of these poems there's 180 of them they're clear they're coherent they're they don't require explicate explica see all they they're just and and it wasn't meant to compete with teaching or classroom analysis it was meant to complement it so then it turned into their - it turned into to print anthologies so there's really like 360 poems out there that are I hear from many teachers are very useful in high school classrooms and because I always thought I just think that you know poetry should be talked chronologically backwards I know in like survey courses you start with Chaucer it's a ridiculous place to start you know so I think if you start with contemporary poetry that you know you cook students on that and then you can walk students chronologically backward into modernism and and even into then into the 19th century but so that was the idea of poetry when aadya was just a complement to classroom discussion and also to show students contemporary poetry because high school teachers are the salt of the earth I mean they're incredibly busy and in credit and they have so little time to some to do something like keep up with contemporary poetry some of them do of course great but if a teacher relies on a textbook or an anthology anthologies don't keep up with what's going on today usually I mean we have like the William Carlos Williams poems like the red wheelbarrow and stuff like that and I was saying yesterday this poems are like they're now almost 100 years old and we treat them as like the latest thing they just came out and so poetry 180 was also telling student this is how poetry sounds right now because many of most of the poems in there were like written in the last 20 years what about hip hop or spoken word kind of things would you include that in how poetry could be taught I don't know I mean I this I give a reading a well just a few weeks ago and this rather elderly gentleman came up to me and he said what do you think of hip hop music and and I was I said it's a few things about it and then I said are you do you listen to hip hop music and he said well at intersections I do so I don't know if you're aware of this but I wrote a I wrote a poem for this evenings occasion I know you're asked to write poems on the occasion of 9/11 Grand Central Station turning a hundred years old I wrote one well can we make measure area of course all right well yes now you can well yeah it's my show it's this is while preparing to interview Billy Collins the stack of books came to three at a time from Amazon creating an online clamor from other poets who said people who by Billy Collins poems also like me and often by us together but I am monogamous for the time being and I read about details of his life where he is swinging from a hammock lighting a cigarette listening to Thelonious Monk and I wonder why my life details seem so dull but they are like his details but his are profound the faint tapping from the crock pot in the kitchen reminds me that my daughter is coming over for dinner tonight so my wife can help her with her taxes I walked to the closet to get my vitamins seven each morning to ward off the deadly sins of heart disease cancer prostate enlargement muscle loss bone loss the common cold and all other maladies that have not yet been discovered my hand hovers over other jars the hemlock the arsenic the anthrax and decided to swallow those later if the interview with Billy goes badly preparing for Billy Collins has made me reading poems of his all the time instead of only when I grieve tonight I lie in bed and think about the Big Dipper spilling ink into the sky and taking off Emily Dickinson's clothes and a three year old reciting his poem litany and I descend into the deep water below Earth's surface past the fracking into the core where I crawl out of the use amoeba-like then divide then wriggle like a tadpole then grow short legs then arms that pull me onto land then legs strong enough to hold me up right then I'm running than flying suspended in the updraft updraft of his next stanza where the poetry creates lift and I see into the Sun you have learned well yeah baby I just pulled that out just while we were over here waiting to get started I had no idea how easy this was but getting back to me you have said that we turn to poetry when we are looking for something yeah and and so is that why like a commemoration poem for 9/11 or a centennial for uh well I think I think that the verb look turning to is interesting you know that people turn to poetry and you don't say they we turn to sculpture or we don't turn to LA I don't think I don't know when there is a moment of a crisis which could be something national or even global like 9 September 11th or moments of high importance like weddings or funerals and lots of stuff in between birthdays or whatever we and we often turn to verse 4 I think it's for a kind of a stabilizing influence you know that the verse not only reminds us that we're in a community of feeling and we're not the only ones to be feeling this but it also connects us to a kind of history of feeling and and usually the rhythms and the sounds of poetry have a kind of stabilizing I guess I've used that word but a stabilizing and therefore kind of comforting effect but it's interesting that after right after 9/11 there was a lot of a lot of talk about poetry and no one said well you know we've just suffered this we've been attacked from another country and we should all like go to the movies or something you know no one it was all it was all about poetry so it shows you that there is some kind of powerful recognition empowered that poetry is as is a is a great accompaniment in a way to to important events in our personal lives or in the lives of the nation this is going to sound like a facetious question but it's it's it's really not but you you have talked about poetry as being becoming autobiography and that that has taken over poetry how so how was poetry different from something like Facebook which is all out of biography well Facebook does doesn't achieve metaphor it just stays Facebook you know I mean it just I'm going out for a pizza great - I'm wish I could go with you what kind of pizza are you having Wow I love pizza I mean it's just not it's not going anywhere but I mean poetry if a poem starts autobiographically and just stays on the level of narrative autobiography it fails to interest me and it really should the writer should go down the hall and and join the fiction class or the memoir class what poetry does if it starts autobiographically if it's if it's if it's any good or personally if it just is going to get my interest is that it lifts out of it lifts itself out of the particularity x' of the of the writer's life into a condition of metaphor and the metaphor includes the reader because the metaphor is general language it's not you know particular language it's not about your uncle and this fishing trip you took it's about something greater that everybody can plug in to so that's I think that's what what poetry can do that other kinds of discourse are are unable to do or simply not their job to do sure now we have a number of people in our audience and who will be watching this who are writers or aspiring writers what advice can you give them well to be to be respectful of the reader or you know to be at Lee's reader conscious that to to realize that self self expression itself I think is as well be overrated as an activity Zadie Smith Zadie Smith said if you want to express yourself just go out in the backyard and ring a bell I mean I the whole idea for me is to is as Borg a says to capture the reader its capture you capture the reader and you do it through strategies and you do it through a seductive technique which sounds rather demonic or something but I just mean a seductive technique would be having a clear title on the poem and and not writing a poem that's deflective of entry a poem that just welcomes the reader into it and it's not obstructive in any way and picturing a kind of imaginary reader I you know when I'm conducting these workshops I sometimes say you know okay you've written this poem imagine a reader reads the poem and then says to you I'm not sure what you're talking about you should include the response to that reader in the poem you know tell tell them what you're talking about what are you getting at I know some writers who actually put a picture of someone yeah next to their monitor next to their legal pad or whatever dude do something like no no it's just it's how old no it's just I'm cuz I'm writing to myself really I mean I'm writing to someone who is like me where I'm writing to maybe other poets but I think the advice is really poetry sort of a mixture of clarity and mystery I think and it's very important to know when to be clear and when to be mysterious and that's something that's it's very hard to teach you can only learn it by reading a lot of other poetry but it's knowing that there are what cards to turn over and what cars to leave facedown and if you turn all the cards over at the poem is simple minded but if you leave them all facedown there's no game either you can't play that it's just impenetrable obscurity and often mistakes or I think this tactical mistakes are made in poetry when when someone tries to be mysterious about something that just should be clear you know I mean this is about apple picking with your mother why didn't you say so or call it apple picking with my mother it you don't mention apple or mother so flip we need we have to see a card that's the card that needs to be turned over now how you feel about your mother that's a that's a mysterious card you know yeah that's something that is is probably fraught with ambivalence and is not to be simplified or or trivialized though bytes by statement by you know over its statement so leave those cards down but at least we have to know you're in an orchard I mean that there's no secret there right but it's I mean we're we're giving giggling but it's it's almost every poem this is not working as usually is guilty of of one of those two sins of being clear about something that will you can't be clear about or being mysterious about something that should be obvious it should be given I think you have a poem that you would like to finish off our time sure yeah I didn't know we were what kind of poem would you like concluding song for a concluding hahaha poem to finish interview with Billy Collins okay okay here's here's one so it's there's a new oh it's not that new but five or seven years ago a new wing at the metropoliz in New York of for Greek and Roman statuary and it's just absolutely gorgeous there's a translucent roof and the stat it's never seen statues look so good in that in that light and of course there are many of them because they're ancient are damaged and the poem is called Greek and Roman statuary the tip of the nose seems to sorry the tip of the nose seemed the first to be lost then the arms and legs and later the stone penis if such a thing were featured and often an entire head followed the nose as it might have done when bread was baking in the side streets of ancient Rome no hope for the flute once attached to the lips of that satyr with the puffed out cheeks nor for the staff the shepherd boy once leaned on the sword no longer gripped by the warrior the poor lost ears of the sleeping boy and whatever it is Aphrodite once held in her severed hand but the torso is another story middleman last to go bluntly surviving propped up on a pedestal with a length of pipe and the mighty stone ass indoors so smooth and fundamental no one hesitates to leave the group and walk behind to stare and that is the way it goes here in the diffused light from the translucent roof one missing extremity after another digits that got too close to the slicer of time hand snapped off by the clock whole limbs caught in the mortal Thresher but outside on the city streets it is raining and the pavement shines with the crisscross traffic of living bodies hundreds of noses still intact arms swinging and hands grasping the skin still warm and foreheads glistening it's anyone's guess when the day will come when there is nothing left of us but the bare solid plinth we once stood upon now exposed to the open air just the wind and the trees and the shadows of clouds sleeping sweeping over its hard marble surface thank you thank you you

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 48,333

Rating: 4.8521562 out of 5

Keywords: Billy Collins, poet laureate, poetry

Id: evqo3HVAmQI

Length: 88min 15sec (5295 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 28 2013