would have thought possible, make poetry popular
by Wallace Baine
reposted from The Santa Cruz Sentinel posted 11/6/2013
When Billy Collins goes to an unfamiliar bookstore, he's got a line he likes to use: "So, where do you hide your poetry?"
He's joking, sort of. In that place where literature meets commerce, poetry has historically been something of a forgotten stepchild. It doesn't settle political scores. It doesn't dish on celebrity love affairs. It's never optioned into summer blockbusters coming soon to a theater near you.
In short, it doesn't move units. And sure enough, when Collins goes into that unfamiliar bookstore, more often than not he'll find the books of poetry in the most inaccessible part of the store.
But, wait a second. What have we here?
Right there in the top hardcover "fiction" titles in this week's bestseller lists, we find a new book of poems called "Aimless Love" (Random House), by the very same Billy Collins, right there cheek by jowl alongside such literary brand names as John Grisham, Dave Eggers and Stephen King. (The book is third on the hardcover fiction list of The Indie Bestseller List, a survey of the country's independent bookstores, to which the Sentinel subscribes.)
Collins, a former two-term U.S. Poet Laureate, may very well be America's most bankable poet. His books sell in numbers that other poets can only dream of, and his readings are consistently packed. One such reading takes place at UC Santa Cruz's Music Recital Hall on Friday. The event is sold out.
"Aimless Love" is a career retrospective of sorts for Collins, a native New Yorker whose work has famously been out in the public eye, on subway trains and bus cards. He also happened to be serving as U.S. Poet Laureate at the time of the 9/11 attacks on New York. His poem "The Names," dedicated to the memories of those died during the terrorist, has never been published before now.
We had the opportunity to chat with the 72-year-old poet, known for his wry humor and down-to-earth poetical sensibilities, on the day after he learned that "Aimless Love" had landed on the bestseller lists.
Wallace Baine: Congratulations on the success of "Aimless Love."
Billy Collins: Thank you. This is the biggest book of my life. In a poet's life, the big books are the New & Selected poems because they gather together the best of previous collections and then add more new poems. It tells what the poet has been up to for the last 10 or 12 years. In this case, we gathered together poems from four previous books and, at the publisher's insistence, I waited until we had 50 new poems that I thought were worth including.
BC: Well, it's closer to fiction than non-fiction, I suppose. It's really beyond fiction. Poetry tends to transcend the limitations of most fiction. Most fiction is mired in what I call bourgeois concerns: Will Edward marry Barbara? Will Janis have the baby? Those kinds of things. That's fine, but at some point, I think we realize there are possibilities of human expression that go beyond a plot, what happens next. If that's the only place they have for poetry, so be it. It's a good thing.
WB: Are the poems in this book tied together thematically? Or is it more like Billy Collins's Greatest Hits.
BC: These are the poems I consider the aces, the A material. I never think thematically. The themes that run through my poetry seem to be the most common themes of literature, themes of love and death, and death and love. All of the books are the same, exploring a lot of different metaphors, but usually arriving at these bedrock concerns. I'm doing what W.H. Auden called "cabinet building." I'm trying to write one solid line at a time and have them add up to one satisfying stanza at a time.
WB: Your poems seem to be rooted in the real world. I noticed the muse seems to visit you a lot while you're eating, such as the poem in which express compassion for the fish on your plate.
BC: Well, yes. I'm on the road a lot, so I do eat alone a lot. Isolation is where poems come from. I can't think of a time when I've come up with the idea of poem when I'm at a party or sitting around with a table full of people. But eating alone, that's a time for reflection. One way to avoid complete isolation is to be accompanied by a notebook. It's a meditative time, waiting for the salad to arrive, and that includes even having a compassionate relationship with the poor fish.
WB: When you were young in the 1950s, what was the image of the poet that resonated most with you: the darkly brooding Byronic hero, the isolated too-sensitive-for-this-world Emily Dickinson type, or the grab-the-world-by-the-lapels style of Allen Ginsberg?
BC: I wish I could pick one, but I identified with all of them. One of them was the brooding romantic genius who is alone with his thoughts in a Byronic way. The idea of being alone and reclusive like an Emily Dickinson character appealed to me. There was a time when I was writing bad Allen Ginsberg-style poems — guess what? I was against capitalism and I was all for free sex and drugs. But I was going to a Catholic high school in the suburbs of New York, so I was a pretty unconvincing beatnik. I was going through most poets go through, even if I was learning that these were not my real voices.
WB: Your work was not published until you were in your 40s. Was that about frustration with the publishing industry, or had you just not found your voice yet?
BC: I didn't find my voice until then. I was trying on voices. I was just a slow student. Possibly I never would have found my voice if I hadn't persisted. I was basically writing imitations of Gertrude Stein and Richard Brautigan for a while in the '60s.
Writing (for young or inexperienced poets) is really about casting away false voices that you're trying on. Voice has an external source and the voice is really from other poets. If you find a fresh voice that you can identify with yourself, what you've done is taken a number of mannerisms or stylistic devices from other poets and combined them in such a way the reader doesn't recognize the source immediately. Originality is just disguised influence.
WB: And so reading a lot is about speeding up that process of absorbing influences and throwing away false voices?
BC: Yes. I'm not going to write like Allen Ginsburg. What he writes about is not connected to me. Finding poets that have some connection with you — well, for me, it was people like Philip Larkin, who taught me you can be funny and dark at the same time. I tend to learn one thing from a number of poets. From Whitman, I learned how to be intimate. He's a very broad and expansive poet, but when he talks to the reader, he's got this kind of whisper, where he makes you feel like he knows you. I've always been attracted to that, and in my poems I try to have a confidential tone, like I'm talking to one person.
And you need to learn what to write about. I remember reading a poem when I was a pretty young man by the English poet Thom Gunn about Elvis Presley. I didn't know this was permitted. You could write about Elvis Presley? There's this literary decorum, an unwritten set of understandings, a certain number of things that are correct to write about and some things that are not. Decorum keeps getting broken by someone like Sharon Olds or Sylvia Plath, which allows readers to think, you can talk about your parents like that? Then I can talk about my mother in this kind of critical way. Breaking those decorums is the way that poetry moves forward.
{ Friday 7 p.m. Recital Hall, UC Santa Cruz. This reading is sold out. $4 parking fee applies.