Collins, Billy

Billy Collins

American poet Billy Collins (born 1941) has worked to craft a poetic art that is accessible without being sentimental or crass.

Named poet laureate of the United States in the early 2000s, Collins became the public face of American poetry and embarked on an ambitious effort to insert poetry—not the teaching of poetry so much as the raw material of poems themselves—into American secondary schools. His own books have enjoyed a rare combination of popular and critical success, selling tens of thousands of copies and earning Collins large advance payments unheardof for practitioners of poetic art. A distinctive feature of Collins's career is that his serious activity as a poet began only when he was well into middle age; he published his first substantial collection when he was 47. Collins blamed the prevalence of the idea that poetry should be difficult to understand for the weakness of his earlier efforts. “I wrote poems I hoped no one could understand,” he told Bob Keefer of the Eugene, Oregon, Register-Guard. “If they did there would be no point in writing poetry. We still have to get over our mild hangover from that kind of modernism.”

Nurtured Writing Ambitions

Billy Collins was born on March 22, 1941, in New York, to William S. Collins, an electrician, and Katherine S. Collins, a nurse. His parents were both over 40 when he was born, and he was an only child. The family's financial situation improved after his father landed a job with a Wall Street insurance brokerage, and they were able to move to suburban Westchester County. From the start, Collins was enamored of the idea of becoming a writer. He wrote his first poem at age 12, and later joined the staff of his high school literary magazine.

English classes at school did not stimulate Collins's imagination, however. He recalled to Teachers & Writers magazine that the curriculum focused on “these rather antique poetry voices, mostly dead men with three names— William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, etc.” Instead, it was Collins's father who steered him in the right direction—he noticed that copies of Poetry magazine were being discarded from the collection of publications at his Wall Street office, and he began bringing the magazine home. Collins enjoyed the contemporary poetic voices he found inside. “I remember reading a poem by Thom Gunn about Elvis Presley,” he told Teachers & Writers, “and that was a real mindblower because I didn't know you could write poems about Elvis Presley. I thought there was poetry—what you read in class, you read ‘Hiawatha’ in class—and then when you left class there was Elvis. I didn't see them together until I read that poem.”

Collins attended the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts, graduating in 1963. He moved west to the University of California at Riverside and worked toward a Ph.D. in English, studying nineteenth-century poetry of the Romantic era. He was still nurturing the idea of becoming a poet, and began emulating various contemporary poets in his own writing. One was the durable San Francisco poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose free-verse style was rooted in the era of the Beat Generation. Another was the counterculture fiction writer and poet Richard Brautigan. “He was a real influence on me,” Collins told Keefer. “I wrote bad imitative Richard Brautigan poems for a couple years in the 1970s …. He took the lessons of the French surrealists like [Guillaume] Apollinaire and gave them this Western American spin.”

Nothing in those experiences, however, steered Collins toward a style of his own, and he remained unsatisfied with his work. “My bad poems were bad in the beginning because they were emotionally heavy, brooding, then profound and ponderous,” he told Newsweek. Part of the problem was that he was gifted with an innate sense of humor, which his training in the works of the brooding Romantics had taught him to avoid—and humor was not a quality prized in the world of modern poetry, either. Collins sold some poems to Rolling Stone magazine for $35 each in the 1970s, and he published two small collections, Pokerface (1977) and Video Poems (1980). Newly married to his wife, Diane, an architect, he settled into a teaching job at Lehman College, part of the City University of New York.

Work Appeared with Major Publisher

Through the 1980s Collins's output was sparse. He reemerged with The Apple That Astonished Paris, published by the University of Arkansas Press in 1988, the title itself indicating a new attitude in his poetry. Collins's breakthrough to national prominence came with his next book, Questions About Angels, which won the 1990 National Poetry Series competition. As a result, the book was issued by the major Morrow publishing house in 1991, giving Collins access to an audience beyond academic readers and poetry specialists. As Collins's fame grew, the university presses that issued his first books jockeyed with commercial publishers for control of his poems; the University of Pittsburgh Press, one of his early supporters, was unwilling to give up the rights to what had become some of the most profitable items in its catalog.

Questions About Angels (1991) attracted mixed reviews, but it accomplished what most of his contemporaries had failed to do—it attracted a wide readership. The Art of Drowning (1995) and Picnic, Lightning (1998), along with Questions About Angels, sold tens of thousands of copies, almost unheard-of totals in a world where a volume of poetry selling 5,000 copies is considered a strong success. For three books beginning with 2001's Sailing Around the Room: New and Selected Poems, Collins received payment in six figures from the publisher Random House, which found its investment repaid when Sailing Around the Room passed the 100,000 sales mark.

The secret to Collins's success did not lie in any special simplicity or in any overt attempt to popularize his poetry. He used plain language and wrote about details of everyday surroundings, but some of his poems referred obliquely to poetic classics (opening Poetry magazine, he told Teachers & Writers, was “like looking into Chapman's Homer,” echoing a famous work by British poet John Keats), and he relied in general on drawing readers into his works rather than making his writing transparent. One aspect of Collins's appeal hinged on his ability to mix humor and seriousness in the same work. The title poem of The Art of Drowning imagines a drowning person who sees life flashing before his eyes, and suggests that a full-scale slide presentation would be more desirable, but later turns serious, describing the moment of death, the water's “surface now covered with the high/travel of clouds.”

Collins's poetry flourished in live performance, and he gained added exposure when he appeared on the radio program A Prairie Home Companion, hosted by his friend Garrison Keillor. He seemed able to ennoble everyday scenes with poetry—as in “Snow Day,” which described “the government buildings smothered/schools and libraries buried, the post office lost/under the noiseless drift …. In a while I will put on some boots/and step out like someone walking in water/and the dog will porpoise through the drifts …. But for now I am a willing prisoner in this house/a sympathizer with the anarchic cause of snow.”

Named Poet Laureate

In 2001 Collins was named United States Poet Laureate (officially Poet Laureate Consultant to the Library of Congress), succeeding Stanley Kunitz. The position of poet laureate has been treated differently by its recipients, with some opting to use it as an opportunity to write. Collins, however, followed Robert Pinsky and many of his other predecessors in using the position as a platform from which to try and increase awareness of poetry in America, specifically in American schools. Collins's efforts were chronicled in a DVD, On the Road with the Poet Laureate, that chronicled his travels and readings. In 2002 Collins was reappointed as Poet Laureate for a second one-year term.

One of Collins's most visible initiatives as Poet Laureate was the creation of Poetry 180, a selection of 180 poems by various authors (the name and number were derived from the fact that an American school year consists of roughly 180 days), designed to be read aloud to students via public address system, one per day. Collins asked school personnel not to analyze the poems or give students assignments based on them, but merely to read them aloud—“no discussion, no explication, no quiz, no midterm, no sevenpage paper—just listen to a poem every morning and off you go to your first class.” The poems were posted on the Library of Congress Web site and also issued as a book, Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry. They were so successful in that form that it was followed by a sequel, 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day. Collins was partly motivated by his own almost accidental discovery of poetry as a young man—he believed that putting students in direct contact with accessible poems was the best way to interest some of them in the art.

Meanwhile, Collins continued to publish new poetry of his own and to find an enthusiastic audience for his work. Sailing Alone Around the Room was followed by Nine Horses in 2003, after which the poet took a detour into the world of children's literature with Daddy's Little Boy (2004). In 2006 he issued The Trouble with Poetry, which began with the wry lines, “The trouble with poetry/is that it encourages the writing of more poetry.” In 2004 he served as New York State Poet. He continues to live with his wife in Somers, New York.

Books

Authors and Artists for Young Adults. Vol. 64, Thomson Gale,

2005.

Periodicals

Buffalo News, December 1, 2003; November 17, 2006.

Commonweal, January 11, 2002.

Independent (London, England), May 31, 2003.

News & Record (Piedmont Triad, NC), March 28, 2004.

Newsweek, July 9, 2001.

Register-Guard (Eugene, OR), September 21, 2006.

Teachers & Writers, March-April 2002.

Writer, April 2006.