|
By Karen Hart  Poet
Billy Collins '63 has made a life of looking at things
with his head askance, his sights set just slightly askew.
There's the poem about the three blind mice, how they got that way, why they
had run after the farmer's wife. There's the one about looking back at being
10 years old and feeling queasy just in the hindsight. There's the Mr. Sillypants
name-calling in "Child Development," and the obsessive dissection of seductive
lingerie models in "Victoria's Secret."
The poetry of Billy Collins sets its hook with a laugh.
A laugh of embarrassment, of self-recognition, or perhaps, just plain giddiness.
But read on and there
is always the tug on the line that runs directly to the heart.
Collins, who is the author of six books of
poetry, has enjoyed press runs unheard of in poetry publishing.
His Picnic Lighting sold
25,000 copies in 1998 and a compact disc recording of his book The Best
Cigarette sold
out in its first printing. He has been featured on Fresh Air with
Terry Gross and on A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor,
both on National Public Radio. Collins' seventh poetry collection, A
Study in Orange and White, is expected to be published in mid-2000.
Collins has taught English at the City University of New York's Lehman College
long enough to see a generation of students come and go. He has seen plenty
of the country, too, during his couple dozen cross-county readings each year,
but this popular "blue jeans style" poet got his start in the poetry business
as an undergraduate at Holy Cross.
The Purple was the first journal to publish his poems, and
before he graduated, Collins was working on the journal as editor.
"I didn't have any idea I would have a real book published," Collins said of
his Holy Cross years. "It was a limited pool of literary talent, as you would
have at any college. ... We had literary aspirations and romantic ideas of authorship.
... But I was really very much of a late bloomer."
Though he's known for his sarcastic twists on everyday life, Collins admits
his wry way with words came later, and that while at Holy Cross, working on The
Purple was all business.
"It was very cliquish, we were the campus intellectuals," Collins said of the
editorial staff. "We held our heads above the jocks. We considered ourselves
proto-suburban beatniks. We always wore black, filled athletic bags with quarts
of beer and played jazz and smoked and carried books of poetry around. We were
very serious and, I'm sure, very silly."
During Collins' years, The Purple was published quarterly
and bound with impressive four-color covers designed specifically
for the
magazine
by student-artists.
"We had an immense budget, something like $10,000 in 1962," Collins said. "If
you look at the issues I edited with the four color covers-for a small liberal
arts college it was a great looking magazine."
Unfortunately, even with the post-beatnik popularity
of poetry at the time, literary works were not always received with equal enthusiasm
as that put into
the creation of the product.
When Purples were delivered via campus mail to
the rest of the student body, most copies, recalled Collins,
were disposed of quickly.
"On the big day every mailbox would be stuffed with these gorgeous magazines," Collins
said. "And we'd go down to the mailboxes and watch how 90 percent of the students
would slam dunk them into the trash. ... I have some of them in the attic now
and every time I go there I see them, so I think of them in an unbidden way.
They are there as reminders."
Post-Purple, Collins' poetry appeared in anthologies,
textbooks, and numerous journals including The New Yorker and The Paris Review. Ask
him, and he stumblingly says he has received a
few grants, won a couple of awards. Actually, he
has a
laundry list
of them, including
one from
the Guggenheim
Foundation, one from the National Endowment for
the Arts, and four from Poetry magazine.
In 1994, Poetry named Collins "Poet of the Year."
Not bad for a guy who remembers his drive to pursue a literary career at Holy
Cross as rising from "feeding off the neglect" of his classmates.
Yet, after graduation, Collins said he stopped writing for a time. He went
to the University of California, worked as a teacher's assistant and earned
his Ph.D.
"I wasn't a poet then," he said. "It was mostly scribbling, private writing.
I didn't know what I was doing. I was writing a real imitative poetry. I read
enough poetry and was verbally smart enough to produce stuff that sounded like
poems. It was really external."
Collins placed poems in Rolling Stone magazine
often during the late '60s
and placed others in "obscure magazines for years and years. It got to the
point where I was exhausted with that and the rejection/acceptance drama," he
said.
His first big breakthrough came when he was in his 40s,
when Questions About
Angels won the National Poetry Series
book award in 1990.
For Collins, it was the beginning of an unexpected but welcome stardom. For
his poetry it was the beginning of a wave of acceptance and popularity, including
the addition of an unlikely fan, Collins' father.
"My father always ignored poetry-until I told him how much money I won," Collins
said wryly. "I could sympathize with him. He was a businessman who worked his
way up, and he felt I should go the same route. An interest in poetry to him
was a step backwards."
Collins says his use of humor "probably comes from my father. ... I try
to use humor as a door into the serious, and a lot of people see an opposition
to that, but I see it as a way in."
Collins said that idea, to open doors to new possibilities through the familiar
and the funny, has always been with him, even in his "serious" days during
his Purple years.
"It probably comes out of the fear of seeming to be overly serious," he said. "Even
from the beginning I wanted my poems to go against the grain. ... The perfect
poem for me now would be one which you could never tell if it was serious or
funny at any given moment, one that rode a knife edge, but I'm still always falling
off to one side."
THE DEAD
The dead are always looking down on us, they say,
while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,
they are looking down through the glass-bottom boats of heaven
as they row themselves slowly through eternity.
They watch the tops of our heads moving below
on earth,
drugged perhaps by the hum of a warm afternoon,
they think we are looking back at them,
which makes them lift their oars and fall silent
and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes.
Billy Collins
from Questions About Angels
William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1991
Back to "Purple Prose
and Poetry"
Features >
|
