Edinburgh International Book Festival Billy Collins 28 August 2006
essay or whatever. It‟s Yeats, I would say, speaking from what‟s been called his equestrian mode, which is from his high horse. [Laughter.] He says, in a rather aloof way:
“A poet … never speaks directly, as to someone at the breakfast table.”
Robyn Marsack: Good evening and welcome to what is, sadly, the last event on the last day of this year‟s Edinburgh International Book Festival. My name is Robyn Marsack and I am the director of the Scottish Poetry Library. This evening, it is my very great privilege to welcome Billy Collins. I‟m allowed a brief commercial break; Catherine Lockerbie said, “It‟s not commercial. It‟s culture”, which is true. You might feel terrible withdrawal symptoms when the festival is over, but you needn‟t, because the Scottish Poetry Library is open from 11 until 6 on weekdays and from 1 until 5 on Saturdays. You might not know where it is, but you might know where the newish Parliament is. The legislators are near the unacknowledged legislators; we‟re just up the road from the Parliament. Of course, we have Billy Collins‟s books on our shelves. Actually, they are more often off our shelves, being borrowed. Billy Collins was the American poet laureate from 2001 until 2003 and he is the laureate of his home state, New York. In Britain, we were introduced to his work with the slightly provocatively titled Taking off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes. His new book is called The Trouble with Poetry and Other Poems. Of course, at the library we felt a little hesitant about having a book called The Trouble with Poetry on our shelves because we are concerned with the pleasures of poetry, but we were reassured when we read these lines:
“the trouble with poetry is that it encourages the writing of more poetry”.
The poem takes issue with that. Billy Collins reads A Portrait of the Reader with a Bowl of Cereal. That‟s just a little welcome to you. [Applause.] Billy Collins: I don‟t know if you know a photographer called Harold Edgerton. He‟s not that well known. He was not an art photographer but a science photographer. Better known is a cousin of his, in terms of photography, Eadweard Muybridge, who took all those photographs of sequential action—of galloping horses and men throwing medicine balls in tights and whatever interested him at the time. Edgerton was interested in the ability of photography, once it reached high-speed capacity, to capture moments of violent impact. A famous photograph of his shows a football being kicked by a boot. It‟s all bent out of shape and you can see what you can‟t see with the naked eye. This poem is based on one of his photographs. Billy Collins reads Ballistics. [Applause.] Billy Collins: You can fill in the blank yourselves. I don‟t know why, but I was reading a book on how to write fiction. Apparently, I was depressed or thinking of a career change, but I came across one of the don‟ts under “dos and don‟ts”. I‟d heard about it before:
“Never use the word „suddenly‟ just to create tension.”
In the case of Billy Collins, that is pure pleasure. Please join me in welcoming him. [Applause.] Billy Collins: Thank you. This is my first experience with the Book Festival in Edinburgh. To be the last in a sequence of, I understand, some 600 authors either is or is not a great honour. [Laughter.] I‟m going to assume that it‟s an honour. The last shall be first, so we‟ll see. I‟m going to read some poems. To write is an act of hope. You hope that someone will be out there to read it. I have a sense of a reader when I‟m writing. Sometimes, when there‟s not much else to write about, I tend to write a poem or two that talks to the reader and tries to maintain our relationship. I‟m going to begin with a poem about my sense of the reader. It has an epigraph by Yeats. It‟s not from one of his poems. It‟s just a comment that he made in an
The advice is old. The most flagrant example I ever heard was something like:
“I pointed the gun at her head and pulled the trigger. Suddenly, shots rang out.”
[Laughter.] I always like to define poetry as opposed to prose in some ways, so I thought that, even if you can‟t use “suddenly” in prose, you can use it in poetry. Billy Collins reads Tension. Billy Collins: I don‟t use a lot of epigraphs, but with these poems, they all seem to have one. They‟re not really decorative; they‟re part of the poem. This one is a quotation that I heard a long time ago. I was very impressed by it at the time:
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“Poems are never completed, only abandoned.”
Billy Collins reads Dharma. [Applause.] Billy Collins: The next poem was written with intention. I read a lot about dogs, and dogs come in and out of my poetry. I teach or conduct creative writing workshops. It‟s easier to give out advice to younger poets, but one solid piece of advice that I have for them is, “If you get stuck on a poem, just have a dog come in. It‟ll be a little break from your self-absorption, and dogs just cheer things up when they walk into a stanza.” But the risk of saying that to younger poets is that they will write sentimental poems. That last poem was probably guilty of having some dewy-eyed lines in it, so I wanted to write a poem about a dog that was free of sentimentality and this was the result. Billy Collins reads The Revenant. [Applause.] Billy Collins: Thanks. I came across an expression yesterday or the day before. I wrote this poem the other day and worked on today, so I thought I‟d try it out. I‟d never heard this expression before and I misunderstood it. Billy Collins reads Baby Listening. [Applause.] Billy Collins: Is “baby listening” a common expression? Not that much. Okay. I‟d never heard it before. Maybe it‟s just a little paranoia, thinking about babies‟ listening to you. I‟ll read a few short poems. The first one also has a little epigraph. I was reading a book about printing and I came across a sentence that jumped out at me:
“It has been calculated that each copy of the Gutenberg bible required the skins of 300 sheep.”
That sunk in. It‟s by Paul Valery, the French poet. I thought, “It‟s very paradoxical and insightful and French.” I started repeating it in my classrooms and I started hearing it from other poets in interviews. Then I got really tired of the quote, and I don‟t buy it anyway. I spend a lot of time finishing my poems. I never abandon them. If I abandon them, they go in the wastebasket. I wrote this poem to repudiate the quotation and my misuse of it. Billy Collins reads January in Paris. [Applause.] Billy Collins: Thank you. Billy Collins reads Adage. [Applause.] Billy Collins: Thank you. I‟ll read a few poems from the new book, The Trouble with Poetry, which Robyn mentioned with a certain degree of ambivalence, as a poetry librarian. [Laughter.] Billy Collins reads The Trouble with Poetry. [Applause.] Billy Collins: Thank you. I‟m going to read another poem that involves stealing. In this case, it‟s even worse than taking an image from someone. It‟s good to confess right away. Everyone loves a reformed person these days, so you can get away with anything as long as you‟re sorry the next minute. But in this case, I‟ve taken the first two lines of someone‟s poem and turned it into my poem, rewriting it for the poet. The reason I did that is that I came across the poem in a magazine. It‟s a love poem. It‟s addressed to the beloved. It indulges in a literary device or romantic strategy—or both—that is hundreds of years old. The assumption is that you‟ll make great headway with the beloved if you compare her to things. Women don‟t appreciate loyalty, affection, respect or fidelity. What women want are similes. [Laughter.] In their hearts, they want to be compared to stuff. This fellow has a 40-line love poem in which the woman is compared to just about anything he can think of, so I wrote this as a little corrective. Billy Collins reads Litany. [Applause.] Billy Collins: Thanks. I‟m going to read two poems about dogs. The first is about my dog and the second is about a different species of dog. The poem about my dog is called Dharma because I‟m trying to figure out if this dog has a Zen quality to her.
Billy Collins reads Flock. [Applause.] Billy Collins: Thank you. I‟ll read two other fairly short ones. If you listen to the radio anywhere, I think, you‟ll hear this kind of announcement. Billy Collins reads Surprise and No Time. [Applause.] Billy Collins: Here are a couple of poems. I didn‟t write them at the same time, nor did I intend them to be a pair, but in hindsight they go together, because the first is about forgetting things and the second is, in a sense, about not being able to forget anything. The poem “Forgetfulness” started out when I read an article called “Literary amnesia”, which stressed
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the writer‟s shock at the fact that he‟d spent a good deal of his life consuming books and that, standing there, surrounded by books, in his library, he was thunderstruck by the realisation that he remembered almost zero of the contents therein. There‟s one very American reference in the poem. Every state in America has a state flower, an animal, a tree and God knows what else—a bird too, I think. No one knows what these things are, but that‟s why I refer to a state flower. Billy Collins reads Forgetfulness. [Applause.] Billy Collins: Thanks. The next poem is called “Nostalgia”. Its genesis was … well, you remember th the 20 century, partially. [Laughter.] You might remember that we were fond of talking about the past, and the recent past, in terms of decades. We still do—we talk about the 50s, the 70s and the 80s. The implication was that everything changed every 10 years: metaphor, style, morality, fashion. It was a way of trying to figure out this strange, elusive thing called the past. If you cut it into little decade-sized pieces, it became a commodity you could grasp. We were always made to feel nostalgic or bitter-sweet about the passing of this parade of decades. That‟s why the poem is called “Nostalgia”. Billy Collins reads Nostalgia. [Applause.] Billy Collins: Thank you. I‟ll just read a couple more, I think, to bring this marathon to an end. I hope none of you has been sitting there for 18 days. [Laughter.] It‟s time to get back to your lives. Poems tend to lean on previous poems. No one is smart enough to go into a room and invent literature or poetry, so it‟s all derivative. This poem is about a haiku—those great little exercises. They‟re great little things in themselves, like bits of amber that capture a moment, but it‟s also a great exercise to write haiku. I love writing haiku. Even haiku masters say that one out of 10 is a good average score for haiku. Mine is less than that, but I inadvertently won a little haiku contest. I sent these haiku to a magazine called Modern Haiku. It was called that rather than Field and Stream or—[Laughter.] One day I got a letter and a cheque for $25. I was the haiku boy of the month or something—I‟d written the best haiku of the month. I know you‟ll want to hear it. You‟ve probably never heard a $25 haiku before. This was my prize-winning haiku:
“Mid-winter evening, alone at a sushi bar— just me and this eel.”
[Laughter.] There‟s a great deal of personal misery in that little poem. This poem comes in three-line stanzas. It has a haiku-like appearance. Billy Collins reads Japan. [Applause.] Billy Collins: Thank you. Well, shall we shut this festival down and make it history? Okay. Thank you for being such a good audience. Let‟s put this into the past and get on with our lives. I‟m going to finish with a poem called “Nightclub”. It has just one reference in it, which I hope you get, just for the sake of your own pleasure. It‟s a reference to a singer named Johnny Hartman. Do you know him? He‟s a jazz singer who died in the 70s. He‟s famous for soulful, mellow renditions of jazz ballads, mostly. He‟s mentioned in passing. Billy Collins reads Nightclub. [Applause.] Robyn Marsack: Suddenly, this reading has come to an end. [Laughter.] Billy Collins will be signing copies of his books in the signing tent next door, so if you have books or questions for him, that‟s the place to go. Billy, to adapt a line from one of your poems, the saucers of our hearts are full of milky admiration. Thank you so much for this evening. [Applause.]
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