Poetry and the Practice of Being Alone: A Q&A with Billy Collins
Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins joined blog writer Isabelle McConville to talk all about the process of writing poetry, the practice of being alone, finding his poetic voice and more in an exclusive B&N Reads interview. Read on to dive into the conversation and Collins’ brand-new collection Water, Water.
Hardcover $27.00
Water, Water: Poems
Water, Water: Poems
In Stock Online
Hardcover $27.00
There is beauty in the mundane — Billy Collins reminds us we just need to remember to look for it. Indoors, outdoors and beyond, this collection is an ode to the wild and weird world around us.
There is beauty in the mundane — Billy Collins reminds us we just need to remember to look for it. Indoors, outdoors and beyond, this collection is an ode to the wild and weird world around us.
IM: My name is Isabelle McConville, and I am the blog writer here at Barnes & Noble. Today, I have the privilege of speaking with former US Poet Laureate, Billy Collins. Billy, you’ve been recognized as a Literary Lion of the New York Public Library, you served as New York State Poet from 2004 to 2006, you were inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and now we’re sitting down to talk about your latest poetry collection, Water, Water. Thank you so much for being here today.
BC: You’re very welcome, Isabelle. Let’s dive in together.
IM: Where did this collection really start for you, if you could pinpoint a memory?
BC: I don’t really operate that way; I don’t think when I’m writing poems that I’m adding to a book, because none of my books are thematic. I don’t have an overarching theme about anything, I just love poems. I write one poem at a time, like how people compose one song at a time, and it’ll end up being an album at some point. After a few years go by, I’ll take inventory and see if I have enough poems for a book — usually around 75 poems — and I’ll send them to my editor. My editor gets rid of poems that aren’t living up to the standard set by the best of the others, and then we get it down to about 60 poems. Basically, it’s just raking the good ones together and then finding some kind of order. In this case, the titles are not overarching or a key to the whole book, the way the title of a novel might be, or even more emphatically the title of a nonfiction book. To pick the title of a book, I’ll think of the book as a commodity at that point, so I’ll look through the table of contents, find what I think will play as a good title, and think about what could be on the cover that’ll be eye-catching and arouse curiosity.
One of the poems is called Water, Water. It’s from the Coleridge poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: ‘water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink.’ Water, Water is very fanciful; it’s about someone who likes to stand up to his neck in lake water, and he does his best thinking there, which is rather bizarre. He has these bad thoughts come in as he’s floating in this lake — one of them is drought and the other one is inundation, and he compares them to the two human fears, suffocation and abandonment. Would you rather be alone or be smothered by people? Apparently, everyone has one fear or the other. He’s a climate denier in a very aesthetic sense. He’s a man of immediate pleasure, and like a lot of people, he’s not concerned about ecology because he has a very hard time thinking about the future. To have an ecological consciousness, you really need to care about people who don’t exist yet. That’s easier to do if you have children and grandchildren, but without that, who are you going to imagine? The man is comforted by the fact that the trees around the edge of the lake are there to guard the lake, and the lake is filled exactly to the brim. He has a moment of ecological crisis, and then he basically represses it.
IM: What can you tell us about the role the natural world plays in your creative process?
“In the process of writing, I’m really trying to make something for the reader more than I’m trying to express myself or express a certain emotion.”
BC: I don’t really address the natural world as an issue. I like to have a sense of a human being in a certain time and place who was inspired to start talking in the poem. He might be sitting under a tree, or he might be looking out a window. One poem begins, ‘Overcast morning, cool and gray,’ just like that. I think I have a more credible speaker because you can picture him in a place. The natural world is often his surroundings. There are many poems in which the natural world becomes an enclosure, an environment where the speaker is drawing a lot of sustenance from. He’s very sensitive to most poetic figures. He is very sensitive to the delights and the changeability and the beauties of the natural world. Many of these things have become habitual in my writing, so I don’t give them much thought. Many of the questions are questions I would never think about, even if I lived 300 years.
The first poem I ever got in an anthology — it was one of the Norton anthologies — was followed by study questions, and I had no clue what the answers could possibly be. In the process of writing, I’m really trying to make something for the reader more than I’m trying to express myself or express a certain emotion. I do that by concentrating on making one line at a time, and then those lines add up to one stanza at a time. Those are the building blocks of a poem: the line, and the stanza. I never stop to think, what does this mean? The question, ‘what does it mean’ is a static question because you can write down its meaning, and there that stands as another bit of print. But how does a poem travel? It’s a much more kinetic and active question. So, when I look at the poems, when I write the poems, I’m trying to travel through them from one place to another, and it’s often from a very usual place to an unusual place, a very familiar place, to a very odd place. The beginnings of the poems are often quite simple and rather hospitable, and the endings of the poems tend to be more demanding, sometimes even surreal. The author can even vanish. Sometimes, at the end of the poem, the author can find a place to hide.
IM: That makes me think a lot about the opening poems of this book, Winter Trivia and Fire. Winter Trivia sets the scene of — what I interpreted to be — a couple having a cozy night in, prepping dinner and playing cards in the time it takes for a snowflake to hit the ground outside. After that, you open the very first section of the collection with Fire, a poem featuring a narrator considering what to take with them in a split second if their house went up in flames. Can you walk me through how you made the decision to use those two poems right in the beginning and what feeling you hoped to invoke in the reader? You’ve said before that stepping from the title to the first lines is like stepping into a canoe — lots can go wrong. Can you walk me through those decisions?
“It’s not like reading a narrative where poems are interlocking or connected in any way. They’re like cuts on a non-thematic record.”
BC: I don’t think many people read a book of poetry front to back, all at once. We’re much more likely to dip in here and there. For the arrangement of the poems, I try to start with an interesting poem and end each section with a strong poem. It’s not like reading a narrative where poems are interlocking or even connected in any way. They’re like cuts on a non-thematic record. My editor suggested that many of my books start with a pre-poem, and that poem is often addressing the reader and signaling that I’m aware of the reader’s existence. Winter Trivia reminded me of being in snow in Vermont where I still visit a lot. It’s really a poem about friendship — I had another person read this who also thought it was a romantic couple, but it’s actually a pal of mine. I thought that if we play poker head-to-head, it probably isn’t my wife, although I do play poker with her sometimes. So, it’s really a poem about friendship.
IM: It’s so interesting also to hear that and realize the poem is about friendship rather than romance; one of the reasons I love poetry is that the way we interpret things says a lot more about the reader.
BC: You can see a couple there without ruining the poem. There are flexibilities in poems where the reader can participate. It’s a limited flexibility. I mean, if you thought one of them was going to murder the other one, then you’d be probably outside the bounds of flexibility. To me it was a friendship poem, but it could be a romantic poem. As long as the snowflake hits the ground at the end, we’re good.
IM: How does it feel to write these poems and know that you wrote, for example, Winter Trivia as a friendship poem, and then put it out in the world and see how people react to it and interpret it? What is that like?
BC: Luckily, I’m not there to hear it. I don’t teach my own poems, and I’ve never been in a classroom where my poems are taught. It’s something I have no control of, and I don’t give any thought to really. There are such things as misinterpretations, but as I said, there is a flexibility where the reader can’t help but bring a set of experiences to everything. There can be irrelevant associations that really twist the poem out of shape, but I never hear it. I find my poems to be incredibly straightforward, especially in the beginning of the poem. I don’t want any reader to check out in the first few lines; I want to get the reader inside of the poem. I use very simple diction. Usually you don’t have to go to the dictionary, but if you do, good for you, you’ve learned a new word. Also, I use sentences, so there’s a kind of grammatical courtesy in my writing, and that’s why I would be somewhat surprised if an interpretation wrenched my poem completely out of shape.
IM: Going into style and word choice from writing your very first collection to being named U.S. Poet Laureate to this new collection, Water, Water, how do you feel your approach to the craft has changed over time? How do you think your style has evolved?
“I was imitating other poets, and I was full of feelings of inferiority to people who were real poets . . . it wasn’t until my thirties that I started writing poems that I didn’t think anybody else could write.”
BC: It hasn’t developed very much. I didn’t get my first book published until I was in my forties. I probably started wanting to be a poet when I was about 16. So, what was I doing in between there besides not getting published? Well, I was imitating other poets, and I was full of feelings of inferiority to people who were real poets. I thought I’d never be published and that most of my writing was trash, and most of it actually was. I was learning through imitation, and it wasn’t until my thirties that I started writing poems that I didn’t think anybody else could write. I didn’t think they were great poems, but I thought I had a stamp, I had a sound. I was letting humor into my poems. I was writing more casually, I was less miserable in my poems. I was fairly happy speaker, and I could use trick endings and trick swerving to make the poem go in interesting directions. I discovered that in my late, mid-to-late thirties. Those poems accumulated and got turned into a book when I was in my early forties. Finding your voice is really a matter of imitating other poets until you’re able to use parts of their craft and parts of their mechanics to in such a way that the sources are not so evident. Once I discovered this persona and way of speaking, I wanted to stick with it. In some of these later books, I think there’s a little more seriousness to them, but at the same time, I think they retain a lot of that early playfulness. I’m not really interested in development, I’m just interested in continuing.
IM: I’m very glad for that. I do love your books.
BC: I don’t want to suggest anything by these comparisons, but if you take a well-known poet like Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman, they sound the same all the time. Emily sounds like Emily, and you don’t want her to develop into something else. I think, if most poets find a groove, they want to explore that and keep with it.
IM: One of my favorites from this collection is the Brooklyn Dodgers, a poem about the narrator checking the total attendance of a baseball game he went to. This poem made me think a lot about why we gravitate toward things like music, poetry, theater, and our favorite sports teams. Why do we stand in those crowds, cheer for our teams, check to see if we were in any social media clips posted online the next day, or check the box score crowd attendance, for example. Why do you think we gravitate toward these things and what made you want to write about it?
“That whole sense of being part of something much larger than yourself, I think that’s what being a fan is”
BC: I think they provide an excitement that seeing a broadcast just doesn’t have; a baseball game has a very specific environment. It has its own weather; it can be freezing or hot, or it could be a beautiful spring day. You’re in control of what you’re looking at; your eyes can look around the stadium at whatever you want to, and some sports are better seen in person. That whole sense of being part of something much larger than yourself, I think that’s what being a fan is. If you were the only fan, imagine that. Maybe a team had one fan and every game, there was just one person sitting there and there was one hot dog consumed. It wouldn’t be much fun. Being a fan means not just being a in group, but a crazy, passionate group.
IM: In When a Man Loves Something, we get to read about a funny exchange the narrator has, between him and strangers in his everyday life, like a plumber and a barista. The lines about the barista being confused by the phrase, ‘this isn’t your grandmother’s coffee shop,’ really made me laugh. I wonder if you could speak to the younger generation and what you’d like them to take away from reading this collection. I think a lot of what you write about is almost in direct opposition to social media, so I wonder what you would want the younger generation to get from reading your poetry?
“Social media is a way to be with others, so you’re never alone . . . I want the poem to be a an intensification of our shared aloneness . . . I think that intimacy can be powerful.”
BC: When COVID rolled along, my wife talked me into doing a Facebook broadcast called The Poetry Broadcast. I did that for 52 months, and I just stopped doing it this year, otherwise, I don’t do social media. Poetry asks you to be alone, as most reading does. You don’t typically read with other people, and generally, this is a larger problem in education of why students don’t like to read very much these days. A teacher said his students really don’t like to read, and they don’t do the assignments. If they have to read a hundred pages for class the next day, they groan, but they love reading out loud in class or acting in a Shakespeare play. He figured out that they just don’t want to be alone. Social media is a way to be with others, so you’re never alone.
The practice of being alone is terrific preparation for being a poet, because you write by yourself. When I started writing as a teenager, I was an only child. I was alone quite a bit of the time, and I think it prepared me to be a poet. I was attracted to poetry because it made me feel more alone; it intensified my sense of aloneness. I think that’s somewhat rare these days. The poems in my collections are directed at someone who doesn’t mind sitting alone with a book and have just one person talk to them. If you take all my books together, there are very few people in there, and that’s because I want to be alone with the reader. I want the poem to be an intensification of our shared aloneness, the reader’s aloneness and my aloneness. I think that intimacy can be powerful. I think social media is sort of an erosion of being alone and a denial of being alone. I mean, you actually are alone. Why not spend part of the time in that condition? It’s the ultimate condition. You were born alone, you’ll die alone. I think there’s a lot of avoidance of that subject or that feeling, and social media tries to distract us with trivial things.
IM: So many of your readers and fans talk about finding peace, joy, solace and humor in your work, which is so important, especially today. What does that mean to you?
“Poetic language is trying to tell some kind of truth, and I think there’s an honesty and an authority about it . . . There’s a speaker who is going to be playful with them and sometimes bait and switch within the poem, but you know you can trust them.”
BC: I think poetry is the opposite of public language, and these are really jittery times. Election Day is tomorrow, and I think the whole nation is sensing an uncertainty and a nervousness that we’ve rarely felt, except in times of war, about the future. The other thing that goes along with that — which may be the worst part of it — is political language, which is, in most cases deceitful. We used to always know that politicians told falsehoods or exaggerated to make themselves look better, but we’ve never quite encountered the maliciousness of the fabulous inventions that have no basis in fact whatsoever. It muddies the waters of the world we’re living in. Poetic language is trying to tell some kind of truth, and I think there’s an honesty and an authority about it, where the speaker isn’t running for anything. There’s a trust system there; the ancient trust system used to be rhyme and meter, regular meter and end rhyme. You can always trust a formal poet to never let you down. If you abandon that, as most of us have, then you just have your own voice to establish trust. I try to present a trustworthy speaker to a certain point, and I think that’s why people sometimes warm to these poems. There’s a speaker who is going to be playful with them and sometimes bait and switch within the poem, but you know can trust them.
IM: Lastly, who are you reading right now?
BC: Oh, I’m reading kind of a nerdy book called Index, The History of the by Dennis Duncan. It’s a history of the index in the backs of books, starting with ancient times, going to classical and then medieval times. The other book I just finished is This is Happiness by Niall Williams. It’s become a runaway bestseller. That’s a book I wish I hadn’t read because I could read it now without having read it and enjoy it freshly.
IM: Thank you so much for being here today.
BC: Thank you.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Photo Credit: Laura Wilson