Loose Leaf Notes

I’ve recently been involved in a self-study of Billy Collins. Here are some of his comments and advice on writing poetry that resonate most with me, collected from interviews found online:

 
~ Poetry is the most ancient form of human expression, and it forms the only true history of human emotion.

 
~ Part of writing is discovering the rules of the game and then deciding whether to follow the rules or to break them. The great thing about the game of poetry is that it’s always your turn.

 
The perfect poem for me would be one in which the reader/listener could never be completely sure at any given point whether the poem was being serious or amusing, grave or droll. The closest word we have to describe that condition is irony.

 
~ The simplified version of the background is that in the first couple of decades of the 20th century, poetry turned down an alley of experimentation (see Pound’s Cantos) and lost its audience. Beginning with the roof-top screaming of the Beats and the simplicity of William Carlos Williams, that audience has been gradually reclaimed.

 
~ Difficulty has a legitimate place in poetry because poetry is a camping ground for ambiguity and paradox. But difficulty is also a place to hide. To hide from judgment. A willfully obscure poem resists specific criticism. It has become fashionable to ignore the reader as a bourgeois throw-back, but I consider that attitude a form of literary rudeness.

 
~ A poem for me is a wire connecting one solitary person to another, each inhabiting a quiet room of their own, preferably one with a jasmine plant in bloom and a big piano with the lid up. Oh, and a small oil painting of a nude.

 
~ Poems are not easy to start, and they’re not easy to finish. There’s a great pleasure in—I wouldn’t say ease, but maybe kind of a fascinated ease that accompanies the actual writing of the poem. I find it very difficult to get started. There are just long gaps where I can’t find a point of insertion, I can’t find a good opening line, I can’t find a mood that I want to write into. But once I do, once a line falls out of the air, or I get a little inkling of a subject and I recognize that, it’s like the sense that a game has started.

 
~ I was a most impressionable teenager back in the days of Beatnik glory, so I responded fully to Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti’s “Coney Island of the Mind”—still a good title—Gregory Corso and others. I was in Paris for a summer in the early sixties and hung self-consciously around the corners of the scene on the Boul Mich, as they called it. I sat at the same table with Corso and others, and I even hung around with an American girl named Ann Campbell, whom Realities magazine had called “The Queen of the Beatniks.” (Let’s see…what did that make me??) But mostly I was a Catholic high school boy in the suburbs who fantasized about stealing a car and driving non-stop to Denver. I probably would have done it, but I didn’t have access to those special driving pills Neal Cassady had. Plus, there was always a test to study for, or band practice.

 
~ When I conduct poetry workshops, I ask the poets to take off all the modifiers and see what they have left. Often, what is left is more. The adjective can be a parasite that feeds off the noun and eventually kills it. There’s nothing like a good noun standing there on its own. Cup. Hat. Bone. Each one tells its own long story. “Chair” is an epic.

 
~ Humor in poetry: I don’t see why it needs to be questioned. You could just as easily ask why is there so much seriousness in poetry?
~ My poetry is something to do with my inner life. It’s an activity. It doesn’t give me an understanding, but it does give me an imaginative thrill. Nabokov said: ‘Life is beautiful, and we’re dying.’ Every poem is about this.

 
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