Everyday Canvas

Pursuing Poetry: Billy Collins

Prompt: Pursue the Horizon has begun again and I'm feeling the need for new poets. Let's discuss your favorite poet and what style the author prefers.

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I don’t have a favorite poet, and I like each poet for a different reason. What I don’t look upon favorably is when a poet sacrifices meaning for form. This I see a lot here in WdC, although I trust implicitly the good intentions of our members. I’d rather a poet let go of the form rather than the meaning. This is probably why I write very little formal poetry as opposed to free verse.

Of the bygone poets, who give precedence to meaning only, I especially like Rumi and Tagore. Since I don’t want to talk about them, I am going to pick a contemporary poet whom I like through my eeny-meeny-miny-mo system, and Billy Collins just won my lottery.

As a tiny bio, Billy Collins, born in 1941, was the poet-laureate of USA twice, during 2001-2003. He was asked to write a poem commemorating the first anniversary of 9/11 for the fall of the towers of the World Trade Center. He read it in front of a joint session of the Congress. He taught in NY universities, Columbia, Lehman College, and the City University. He has quite a few books of poetry and he is a much-liked poet.

What do I like about his poetry? It sometimes startles me either because the poet showed deeper insight into something no one else did before (that I knew of) or because he dared say something no one else would dare to say. Despite the above World Trade Center poem, he mostly writes about ordinary, insignificant things that most poets do not even notice. He starts with the simplest facts but penetrates so keenly into their depths that his perception awes the reader. I think this may point to an unusual intelligence and sense of humor that an average person or a poet may lack. Then, just when I think he is writing about something light and happy, he twists it into something darker and as the icing on the cake, he adds something funny to it.

Here is a Billy Collins Poem. (I suspect he wrote it for his students or maybe not.)

Introduction To Poetry

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.