<< Front page Arts Commencement 2004

Billy Collins gives convocation talk
3/12/2004

The great man stepped onto the stage and up to the podium: here he was, the man our high school English teachers praised, whom your room-mate and grandfather might both read, the incredible poet who actually makes a profit from his poetry, and he was surprisingly small — much smaller than he’d seemed staring intently from the inside flap of Sailing Around the Room. As he began to speak, it became evident that the man was just as inviting as his poetry. Smiling and standing completely at ease, he was both humble and humorous, not at all as pretentious as you’d imagine a best-selling poet laureate to be.

You can read a Billy Collins poem to someone who hates poetry and they’ll laugh. They might even understand it without having to read it twice. In an age where more poetry than ever is being composed (though mostly consumed, as Collins himself admits, by other poets), creative writing programs flourish on campuses across the country and poetry workshops and weekend retreats are becoming more and more commonplace, Collins has experienced a degree of celebrity unknown to Dickenson, Blake or even Coleridge (whom Collins cites, along with Merry-Melodies, as one of his prime influences) in their day. Collins is the public’s poet. His lines consist of straightforward, grammatical units that are rarely enjambed. His subject matter deals with everyday life and is easily grasped. His humor and wit add twists to his poetry that are simultaneously surprising and refreshing. Simply put, Billy Collins is accessible. Perhaps one may relate to him better at age 45, but often enough we understand him at 15. During her introduction last Sunday, Nancy Dye praised him for being “a poet for people who have not studied poetry.”

Collins’s achievement is undebatable. In addition to serving as United States Poet Laureate from 2001-2003, three of his seven collections of poetry have broken records in sales. His poetry was selected in both the 1992 and 1993 editions of The Best American Poetry, and has been published in periodicals such as The New Yorker, The Paris Review and Oberlin’s own Field Magazine, which Collins touts as being the most difficult to get into. The large and eager crowd that attended his reading at Finney Chapel in the last leg of the 2003/04 Convocation Series is yet another testament to his immense popularity and appeal.

He began by reading a poem addressed to the imaginary reader in his mind, titled “You, Reader,” and when he’d finished, he looked calmly at the audience and stated, “So that’s for ‘you,’ now onto me.” Much of the poetry he selected to read pertained to the subject of poetry or it’s authors. In “Monday,” while describing numerous other workers about to start their day, he speaks of “the poets...at their windows,” observing that “before the invention of the window/the poets would have to put on a jacket” and go outside. In “Sonnet” he mocks, much to the audience’s amusement, the stringent format of Elizabethan and Petrarchan sonnets, reading a poem that discusses the various rules that must be followed, such as “the iambic bongos” of meter, but obeys none of them, save the 14 lines in length. He teases the poets of the Italian renaissance, who believed that the key to a woman’s heart was comparing her to nearly everything. The speaker asserts, in a line borrowed from Jacques Crickillon, that his subject is “the bread and the knife” but deviates from this praise by adding that she is “certainly not the pine-scented air./There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.” Collins, who is also a Professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York, imagines in one of his poems most rich with imagery, “Schoolsville,” that all of his former students have come to live in a town where he is a mayor, suspended in age and in interest, delivering term papers to him 15 years late.

Strangely, one the most eloquent and subtle poems Collins read, “Japan,” was greeted with a distinct absence of applause. The speaker of “Japan” wanders through his house reciting his favorite haiku throughout the course of the day. Each time he repeats the verse in a different room, the haiku’s imagery transforms into different objects around him. The poem is a quiet yet powerful exploration of the malleability of words and the fluctuating relationships between the objections and people he encounters. It is a poem that doesn’t tell its reader anything, but rather trusts that the reader will make the proper connections from the picture it presents. So why didn’t anyone clap? Perhaps the audience was waiting for the punch-line, or turning the stanzas over in their mind, wondering what they could mean and why they weren’t funny. Is the purpose of poetry merely to make us chuckle? Some of Collins’s best poetry is more profound than many of his fans pause to discover. One would hope that an Oberlin readership would expect more of Collins than the fanciful plays on words and cute twists he at times delivers; not only that they’d expect this, but that they’d appreciate it when they heard it.

Collins ended the reading with “Nightclub,” from his 1995 collection, The Art of Drowning. The poem begins with his normal dosage of wit and progresses to something more beautiful. Scattered throughout the lines are fragments of vivid imagery: a saxophone hanging like a golden fish, cigarette smoke billowing toward bright lights. The speaker first ponders the lack of deviations concerning fools and beauty from the standard “You are so beautiful and I am a fool/ to be in love with you,” (such as “you are a fool to consider me beautiful”). After leading the audience through the music of Johnny Hartman, past a baby grand piano and into the dark, sexy atmosphere of a jazz club, the speaker eloquently revisits his theme as he joins his surroundings, beginning to play music himself: “We are all so foolish,/ my long bebop solo begins by saying,/ so damn foolish/ we have become beautiful without even knowing it.”


 
 
   

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