The Poetry Center: Billy Collins & Ira Glass Conversation

Billy Collins and Ira Glass conversation that occurred after Billy Collins November 11, 2001 performance at The Poetry Center.

Kenneth (introduction of Ira Glass to the sold out auditorium): Ira Glass is Host and Producer of This American Life from Chicago Public Radio that is heard each week by 1.2 million people on 400 radio stations, please welcome Ira Glass

Ira: That was a pleasure

Billy: Thank you

Billy Collins: You're used to talking to 3 million people at a time, that's…

Ira Glass: It doesn't seem…

Billy: You should feel very relaxed

Ira : Laugh, Um, I've worked most of my life in radio journalism of one sort or another, and one thing that I've noticed invariably happens when people are first given the job of doing a newscast or a radio report is that they assume a certain voice- And they will try to perform like an official newscaster. They'll always… like a kid… when kids play at being newscasters

Billy: Like Tom Brokaw

Ira: Kinda (laugh)

Billy: "It's Tom Brokaw" (in deep voice) (laugh)

Ira: And they get very official and they try to do the official newscast, they try to sound an official way, and I was wondering if that happens with poets too, when they start to write poetry, if they think that official poetry should be a certain way, and if especially, if that happened with you when you first wrote poems, if there was a thing you thought poetry was that's very different from what you've come to think of now?

Billy: I think it happened to me… I don't know if it happened to me, it happens to a lot of poets, I think, who read in a rather artificial way. There was a style of reading that dominated the 19th century and much of the 20th in which the poet would have a kind of elevated incantory voice and there was also, you find this in many American Poets of the 30's and 40's and 50's, there was a kind of literary accent which was kind of like a mild British accent that would leak in there.

Ira: I'm not just talking about the reading style, I'm talking about the writing style. Like I'm wondering if when you first were writing poems if you wrote poems that are more like other people…

Billy: Oh yea, I see what you're asking, oh yeah I did that for years, that's why it took me so long to be able to write poems that I liked, because I was writing (laugh) I was writing terrible poems that were kind of poetry with a capital "P".

Ira: and how long did that period last?

Billy: Until I was into my forties.

Ira: And were you a working poet, like was it your job to be a poet?

Billy: well, no I wasn't working (laugh) no I was just writing. I mean, I thought, until recently I thought like, occasional poetry meant that you just wrote occasionally, so I wasn't doing it that often. But I was writing very bad imitative poetry, I was trying to be a poet with a capital "P" and therefore I had to write poetry with a capital "P".

Ira: By any chance, did you happen to have ever memorized one of those poems?

Billy: (laugh)… and would I share it with you ? No! No, Um, You wouldn't want to know, they're…

Ira: You're wrong about that, I would like to know, and you're sure you don't want to…

Billy: I wrote bad… I went through all these phases, I was a… kind of a proto Beatnik and an angry young man and I wrote like, bad Ferlinghetti, and then I went into this, I was in a brooding romantic genius stage for many years in which I was too sensitive to write a word (laugh) and then I was in a Wallace Stevens phase for many years and I wrote, I thought poetry, the capital "P" of poetry, I thought meant that poetry had to be difficult, and at some point I realized that it's difficult enough to write poetry, it shouldn't be that difficult to read it, so that's when I became more plainly spoken.

Ira: was it something in particular that led to that thought arriving for you . Was there somebody's work who you noticed… like, what led to that conclusion finally happening?

Billy: There were better influences I think, more relaxed voices than Wallace Stevens, because I grew up being fed by high modernism, you know, Crane, Elliot, Stevens, and Pound, and it took a while to get out from under their shadow. I actually got a letter quite recently from a college teacher of mine who is quite elderly now, as you can imagine (laugh), and uh, in the letter he almost apologized, I hadn't heard from him in decades, but he almost apologized because he was admiring my poetry for being sort of clear, and he almost apologized for being a proponent of this high modernism, and for foisting this difficulty upon us, or upon me as the student.

Ira: How did you feel getting that letter? Did you feel a sense of forgiveness or did you feel angry at him for having done it to you in the first place? (laugh)

Billy: No, I felt… no I was glad he had done it, it was the only thing that was there to do but it was, uh, I felt justified I guess… there was a nagging suspicion that that difficulty was in some way unnecessary.

Ira: See I wonder if when you were trying to find a voice if they were helpful exemplars in poetry or if your voice in writing came more from reading people who do prose.

Billy: Oh, there are a lot of prose influences, I don't know, I mean I've been influenced by everything from Loony Toons to Walter Pater. I was thinking the other day, asking about strongest influences would be like asking one of the drips on a Jackson Pollock canvas, or asking the canvas what was the most important drip to hit you (laugh), because influences are just splashed all over you as you're reading and viewing things. But I mean, I'm not in any way against difficult poetry. I teach difficult poetry and there's a pleasure in poetry that's difficult, because often poetry is saying something that can't be said otherwise, and sometimes that takes a change in normal ways we use the language.

Ira: sure, but so many of your poems, or at least a number of your poems, seem like an attack on a certain kind of poetry itself, for example "you are the bread and the knife," (from Litany) or "On Turning Ten"

Billy: well true, I'm shooting at these, I mean that is a mannerism in poetry "you are the something" "you are the etc…" and it comes out of that petrarchan sense of flattering the woman by comparing her to the beauties of nature, or to the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table, "you are the whatever." Yeah, so I'm undermining… I think, like many poets, I'm taking conventions that seem to be played out and having fun with them because they can't be done seriously anymore.

Ira: um, sometimes reading your poems I get the feeling that, and I guess this is what I'm driving at with these questions, I get the feeling that you feel about poetry the way that I feel about public broadcasting, that your feelings are not always entirely friendly, because of the cloak of high mindedness that people often bring to it instead of a sense of pleasure.

Billy: sure, and I think I'm trying to level some of that ponderousness or that high seriousness or that high tone. For me, the poem is kind of a bit of imaginative travel and it doesn't really require difficult language, at least from the beginning. It might require certain imaginative jumps or leaps, or… Yeah, a lot of my poems are about poetry. I think the other reason is now that I'm a college professor and I've taught poetry, I've taught this poetry for years and years and that poetry is always kind of circulating in my mind as I write, so I'm playing off of it.

Ira: um, now that you have a job as Poet Laureat

Billy: (laugh) Pause… I have a job?

Ira: a job which includes the idea… do you see it as your job partly to be promoting poetry itself… like poetry itself, the idea of poetry.

Billy: Only with severe qualifications, because I don't find… there's a lot of poetry being written, that has been written, that I wouldn't want to promote because I wouldn't want to read it. I find it difficult to just pick up the poetry banner and just wave it indiscriminately, I'd like people to read good poetry. I'd like to share what I think is good poetry with people. But the sheer indiscriminant advocacy for poetry is something I'm a little shy about jumping into.

Ira: you have a poem called Death of Allegory, where you talk about the big ideas leaving the stage of poetry, of truth, and reason, and justice, and have you thought about why they've left the stage, why as readers we don't want that, why that feels wrong, and grand, and wrong to us.

Billy: Well, that's a good question, I think probably the first and second world wars, Freud, Darwin, Copernicus (laugh)... I think so many things have leveled this ability to speak confidently about abstractions, and I also think for poetry it's a sense that poetry begins, or can begin, in more modest dimensions, and maybe the truth, and beauty, and justice are things that a poem tries to hint at at the end of itself, but that it's not a confident language that we can speak with.

Ira: Reading that poem this last week, I was thinking that one of the things that was striking to me is that there are still parts of the world where people do think that way and one gets the sense that, the people who did the attacks on the world trade center, that everything is about the grandest language possible.

Billy: Yeah, well those acts are, you can either say, go beyond language or that they are based on a fanatic misreading of a book. Someone said that books are not dangerous, "a book" is dangerous, if you read just one book over and over again (laugh), that's dangerous (applause). I think if those acts had a religious motivation they might have come from the over reading of a book.

Ira: Let me pull the microphone closer to you

Billy: Okay

Ira: okay

Billy: Those abstractions like truth and beauty, someone pointed out that if you look in the yellow pages under beauty you will find all sorts stuff, but if you look under truth you'll find nothing (laugh).

Ira: Have you noticed…

Billy: It's always good to get the interviewer laughing (laugh)

Ira: Have you noticed, just thinking about the grand words, have you noticed the president using the word evil, throwing around the word evil in recent weeks.

Billy: And crusade, yeah, I mean that's the vocabulary of war, I mean that's what when Wilfred Owen wrote his poem "Dulce et Decorum Est" he says

To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.

"It is sweet and good to die for your country"

and that's a capitalized oration abstraction, and I think when people clash they clash because of abstractions. The particularities aren't going to hurt us, you know, the mushroom, the dog, it's truth and justice and good and evil, it's those kinds of terms that tend to set us against each other I think.

Ira: I have to say when the President says it, for me, it always feels like an anachronism, for all the reason that we're saying that these big words seem anachronistic. I asked a friend though and she said that's just because I'm not religious. That if I were more religious that idea would be a little more present as an idea.

Billy: I think that word probably means a lot to a lot of Americans when he says evil.

Ira: Yeah. Do you find now that you're the Poet Laureate you're in the unusual position of being called on by a nation to weigh in on matters that perhaps you would not have bothered to form a strong opinion about before (laugh), or…

Billy: Or any opinion whatsoever (laugh). That's very true, I didn't know this went along with the job. I didn't know what I was getting into really. But yeah, it is uncomfortable to some degree, to have people ask you for your… I mean no one has ever asked me for my opinion seriously, uh rarely (laugh), but people want to know what I think and I, I think unless you are use to it, it's rather uncomfortable to speak, to try to speak collectively. Since poetry, we were saying on the radio today, is a personal means of communication, I think from one person to another, and to be asked to take a position is a little awkward for me. So my position is, tends to be no position and to duck some of those questions.

Ira: Huh, (pause, laugh) It seems like such a beautiful thing that as a country we decided "god, we're going through a tough time, you know what we need, we need a poet!" We don't have a songwriter, we don't have a novelist, we have a poet. You know, we have hard times here, bring on the poet, you know, it's so ancient.

Billy: Yeah, we don't have… we don't say in this time of crisis let's all read a short story together (laugh), or let's go to the movies.

Ira: You gotta watch you say about this because Mayor Daley is trying to get us all reading the same novel.

Billy: Simultaneously? (laugh)

Ira: Is it simultaneously Lois, at the same time ? Is there a date? Oh, it has nothing to do with you (Lois). Um, (laughs) So how's that going, being asked constantly, how…

Billy: Well, as I said, I've learned to kind of faint a bit to the side of that, it encourages a glibness that I'm trying to resist.

Ira: yeah, that seems like a decent way to do it.

Billy: I mean, I don't want to deliver the news that Terrorism is a bad thing, for example. I mean, I don't want to be the one to say I'm against it. (laughs)

Ira: have you found yourself in the last month and a half thinking okay, better sit down and write something about "this."

Billy: No.

Ira: Really, not at all, not even one shred of impulse.

Billy: Not at all, no, not really, no.

Ira: Oh my goodness. You have a very centered artistic conscious that it wouldn't even tempt you.

Billy: Well, I wrote that poem about Vivaldi and the two lovers on the train, and, I don't know, I think that poem like the Vivaldi poem and the boy and the girl I saw on the train, if pressed I would say that's an anti-terrorism poem. (laughs)

Ira: yeah, no joke! Because your work is accessible and often funny, did you have a hard time with editors and others getting taken seriously?

Billy: Um, I think misunderstood sometimes, but not, I think some editors welcomed the change from poetry that was constantly weighted and heavy.

Ira: At one point during the talk tonight you said "there are a number of rules that I violate, that one of the rules is to not write about writing." Could you please list for us some of the other rules that you willfully… because when you said that I thought, "god are there rules like, okay, if you're a poet you don't work with kids and dogs" but then there was a kid poem and a dog poem, so you know…

Billy: Alright. Well, I don't know, maybe I was being facetious. I think there's a lot in workshops, poetry workshops, people come up with dos and don'ts and I think that was one of them anyway.

Ira: Are there others rules that you're conscious of breaking.

Billy: Well yeah, I think maybe to write poems about other poets for example. I've written poems about Wordsworth and about Frost and I've written, I don't think people write poems much about what they're reading but I tend to write a lot of poems about what I'm reading and what I'm listening to on the radio especially.

Ira: The corollary to that is that on television people never watch television, except on the Simpsons.

Billy: That's all they do is watch television on the Simpsons.

Ira: There was a, somebody was writing about your work in the New York Times that made me very angry, and I was curious what you had to say about this. This is Richard Eder reviewing "Sailing Alone Around the Room" a month ago today (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F07E7DE133CF93BA35753C1A9679C8B63) He said "Mr. Collins poems do not insight: neither to revolution, change of life, surge of the spirit… They won't make you braver." I was wondering what your take is on his reading of what we should expect of poetry

Billy: Yeah, (chuckles). I've always set out to make you braver (laughs), to give you more courage to face life. Well, I think that's a wild misreading. I don't know if it was that review or some other one that said "but after all, Mr. Collins is there to entertain us," which was a condemnation on his part. I mean, poetry has traditionally been more than just entertainment, but it certainly does entertain, so I think that sounds like a misreading.

Ira: What do you think is the proper scope for poetry? What do you think, what do you feel comfortable shooting for? This made me so mad.

Billy: Oh yeah, well good I'm glad.

Ira: Because I felt like it was saying, it made me try to think about "have I ever read anything that made me…"

Billy: Brave (inaudible) ?

Ira: Yeah.

Billy: Except maybe the Boy Scout Manual, or something (laugh). I don't know, what I would hope for my poems, and much of this stuff you don't think about as you write, but you think about it when you're asked. You think about it later, but what I would think from my poems would be that if it fails to make you braver, which it does, that it might take you on an imaginative journey. It might, in other words, it might be an exertion or an exercise of imaginative freedom. We think of freedom of speech, but also, there's freedom of the imagination, and I think that also could be construed as an anti-terrorist stance. My poems are attempts to create some kind of imaginative lift or travel in the reader, and, well, that I suppose.

Ira: Do you think pleasure is underrated in poetry?

Billy: Absolutely. Yeah, because it's associated with the pain of the classroom.

Ira: That's so interesting. I never stopped to think about it, that's right, the first exposure that we have to poetry is in a classroom.

Billy: And in that case we suffer the pain of humiliation often, because we don't know what the poems' about and the teacher knows, and there's this terrible disadvantage we're under. Or it's given to us as adolescence, and poetry is really, as Matthew said, appeals to our desire to slow down. Whereas adolescence we're trying to speed up, so it's very difficult to convey that. I wrote an article just recently called "Poetry, Pleasure and the Hedonist Reader" it's about the kinds of pleasure that can be derived from poetry.

Ira: What's it say?

Billy: Oh, it says, it talks about a number of pleasures, I think there are five or six or seven, the last pleasure is the pleasure of meaning. One of the pleasures is the pleasure of rhythm, pleasure of musicality, pleasure of companionship, the pleasure of the shape of the poem on the page, the pleasure of imaginative travel and things like that. But the last pleasure is the pleasure of meaning. But I think, unfortunately, when poetry is taught, meaning becomes the first and last emphasis.

Ira: I remember when I was in school, I remember the age that I was at, and I was in college already and I had the experience. I had gone to your normal public schools and got A's in English classes, and I remember I was 21 years old and I was talking to friends before I had the experience where the thought occurred to me that when you read a book you would try to take the experiences personally. Up until then I was reading the way I had been taught in school, which was you figure out the themes, and you figure out the authors intent and it hadn't even struck me that there would be another reason why you read.

Billy: Right.

Ira: And it opened a big door.

Billy: The purpose of reading is to answer the study questions.

Ira: Yeah, kinda. And the fact that I had to be in college before that thought would even be presented in a compelling way, and not actually by one of my teachers, when I think about it, but by my friends who were fighting about a book. And I remember thinking "they're fighting about a book."

Billy: Can I read a little poem that answers that question?

Ira: Okay

Billy: If I can find it here, it's about teaching, it's about teaching poetry, it's called "Introduction To Poetry," and the "them" I refer to are my students.

-Introduction To Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

(Applause)

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