Billy Collins Enters the Ear of the Reader
by Gary Lehmann
Billy Collins is everybody's favorite poet. His verse reads like prose and his meanings, at least on the surface, are accessible without a dictionary and encyclopedia at hand. He seems to have neatly avoided the common poetic flaw of obscuring his meaning inside a cloud of untranslatable words in English and other foreign languages. He spins credible yarns with just enough fancy to make them funny, but not so much of the Gothic that they lose touch with reality or get too scary. He seems to have found the uncommon ability to display the common touch in poetry.
How does he do it?
Some of it comes from his upbringing. His father was an electrician from Lowell, MA. Billy Collins was born in a small New York hospital where William Carlos Williams practiced as a pediatrician. He was educated in Catholic schools in White Plains, NY through high school, went to college at Holy Cross and graduate school at the University of California, Riverside. His wife is an architect. They live in Westchester County, in an 1865 farmhouse, yet still very much in the orbit of New York City. He loves jazz and good whiskey. He's a reformed smoker. According to Bruce Weber of The New York Times, Collins adopts the style of a 1950's "hip intellectual," not pretentious enough to be from Yale, not effete enough for Harvard, just straight New York - with maybe a little touch of the West Side.
Some of his charm comes from his parochial education. There's a certain timidity, with a dash of daring, a certain deference for occasions and people, a certain outsider quality that tends to be an outgrowth of being educated by nuns who have exempted themselves from much of American life, especially in his days at school. That all comes through in his verse. His voice is droll and fanciful at the same time. There's something of Daniel Pinkwater in him, a bit of the shy hero, the hidden celebrity. He's the clever kid in high school now 50 years later.
When asked to explain his connection to readers, Collins explains, "As I'm writing, I'm always reader conscious. I have one reader in mind, someone who is in the room with me, and who I'm talking to, and I want to make sure I don't talk too fast, or too glibly. Usually I try to create a hospitable tone at the beginning of a poem. Stepping from the title to the first lines is like stepping into a canoe. A lot of things can go wrong."
Clearly this is a poet who has given a great deal of thought to the voice of the poet and the ear of the reader, and how to make the one enter the other with ease. "I think my work has to do with a sense that we are attempting, all the time, to create a logical, rational path through the day. To the left and right there are an amazing set of distractions that we usually can't afford to follow. But the poet is willing to stop anywhere."
That may be the task of all poets, but the point in Billy Collin's case is that we follow him because he knows how to lead us. Let's follow him through this poem entitled "The Effort."
John Updike said of Collins poems that they are "more serious than they seem." This is a shrewd remark. Robert Frost had this same ability, always able to make simple things take on some special attribute that deepens them. And it may be that Collins will ultimately be seen as the direct descendent of Frost. They both write of common life. They both have had a career in academics but write poetry everyone can read. They both are used to the habit of understatement. They both rose up from New England.
Another common thread in Collin's poetry is his ability to use humor to disarm. He has said, "I think humor is a very serious thing. I use it as a way of weakening the reader's defenses so that I can more easily take him to something more." Humor allows him to change the subject midway through the poem without anyone noticing. "By the end of the poem the reader should be in a different place from where he started. I would like him to be slightly disoriented at the end, like I drove him outside of town at night and dropped him off in a cornfield." It's magic. "There is a wonderfully self-entertaining aspect to all of this. You feel delightfully insane in a way, slipping the bonds of logic."
So whether he is reading poetry to 150 screaming teenagers in the Bronx, making a podcast for Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac, or being interviewed by NPR's Terry Gross, he always manages to find us where we live, inserting his gentle observations in amongst our jangled brain matter with a few well-chosen words. He always appears in public dressed like a fellow American, fresh from the mall. He probably had trouble finding a parking place. He seems to have discovered, what we all should have known already, that the key to any effective communication lies inside the ear of the listener.
As Collins himself has confessed in an interview, "Poetry has a small but intense audience, like jazz" and in another interview, "There's so much hand-wringing from cultural quarters about the sad size of the audience for poetry, but here I am, writing poetry that is getting out there." The innocent sense of joy displayed in this revelation is part of his considerable charm.