Reading and Writing Poetry with Billy Collins

This is a masterclass by Billy Collins. I have most of his books. I read him a lot in Los Angeles. He’s accessible, funny, and clear.

Wander with a Notebook

What I can do is wander with a notebook. This is how I start with ideas. I never start with a blank page. Wordsworth called it a wise passivity, calming down and letting the ideas in.

I can wander through another’s poetry, starting with their first line or start five of these, finding which one leads to another line. I can write twenty things I did yesterday, out of chronological order.

Whatever it is, it’s wandering with a notebook, finding a way to let my journeys through space, books, and ideas get back to my work.

Start at the Beginning

Start at the beginning. The point of insertion, the beginning lines, is meant to be easy to accept. Then go on from there. Finish a poem in one day, maybe tweaking it a little, but not really messing with it. Thought moves to feeling. The reader can tell if I use this kind of a flow.

Remember, I can never put my foot in the same river twice, so start accessibly, and finish.

History of Poetry

Poetry is the history of the human heart. It started with Catullus, and it’s the same since—the same language, the same things. Yes, some people like Walt Whitman expanded what the poet wrote about, but it’s the language of the heart, the meaning of our experience. Adventure, loneliness, longing, failure—it’s all there. We’re after the same things, and poetry is how we find it.

What Poetry Offers

Poetry gives us pleasure from sound, form, rhythm, travel. We start with the familiar and travel somewhere in the poem less familiar. There is a pleasure in wild comparisons between two very unlikely things.

To memorize a poem is to make a companion of it.

What Writing is About

Writing is about the love of strangers. Poetry is open feeling, public feelings. They used to think of teenage girls of reaching an age when she went into her room and had feelings. They invented diaries fo her, with little golden locks, sho she could have private feelings. She wouldn’t want her older brother to see those. Poetry is public feelings, an audience of strangers that I want to fall in love with me. I do this with form. The reader is interested in poetry, not me, so I tell the white like, that I love poetry more than I love myself The I important. It gets me out of the way.

“All that is personal will rot if it is not packed in ice and salt.” —Yates

Ice and salt were the preservatives of his day. For poetry, that is rhyme and meter—form. A poem needs something to keep the words together, to turn again in on itself, and keep the reader going.

Self Expression

As a container of self expression, a poem has a chance of getting the reader’s attention. Consider the form as part of that. The white space is silence, and poetry is a displacement of silence. The shape and a few seconds gives a reader easy entry into something that is meant to make them feel something.

Continuation of Lines

“A poem is a continuation of lines whose termination is something other than the end of the page.” —Taylor

Every line pulls the reader back into its body, into something interesting. Take note of how it does that. Don’t leave someone in suspense for something trivial, but give them a payoff, turns, rhythm, and music for turning back in to the poem every time.

Marquis

A title is a marquis, an advertisement, rather than a mystery or a summary. It’s meant to get the reader’s intention. It should be simple like Tuesday or Snow on Pine Trees.

Along with the first lines, a title creates access to the poem, rather than keep people out. Give them a bit of travel, a turn, but make it easy to start.

First Lines

The first lines should be easy to accept. It’s a situation or a scene that anyone can get, like Hemingway or Chekhov. It is a seduction. Don’t make many demands. Those come later. The first stanza leads the reader into a room, then I close the door.

Noticing First Lines

I’ve started to notice how first lines in published poems are all accessible, even older ones are familiar enough.

“Somewhere nowhere in Utah, a boy by the roadside, gun in his hand,” writes Anne Stevenson in Still Life in Utah. Her poem is actually about the stillness after death, which is less mysterious than it sounded—another Collins point.

“Sometimes things don’t go, after all, from bad to worse,” writes Sheenagh Pugh in Sometimes.

“Daybreak until nightfall,\ he sat by his wife at the hospital,” writes Donald Hall in Her Long Illness.

Kenneth Rexroth writes, “You are driving to the airport,” and we’re off in Coming.

This is universal, I have found a little mystery in titles and first lines, but they’re still alluring, still seducing me into the poem.

Meaning

Poetry makes a lotto people tense because it takes work to find the meaning. It takes the most participation of readers. Poetry introduces instability and ambiguity. Consider a spectrum from cookbooks to poems and know that poetry is the anchor of that spectrum.

Multiple Meanings

“Poets are people who can’t say one thing at a time.”

Close Read

A close read of Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken provides a much more rich environment for interpretation, a good example of participating in the poem, rather than taking the avuncular tone of how life should be. We can pry apart our experience with it—the act of prying is important.

I Felt a Funeral, in my Room

“I felt a Funeral, in my Room,” is the beginning of a Dickinson puzzle. Heavy, laden, empty, alone—the truth of after the realization, and it keeps going, a world in every plank as it falls through the floor—the things we dare not see. “A poet of real delicacy and decorum,” Collins tells us. The hen meter of Amazing Grace and children’s rhymes. It has tension and civility. The feeling is physical.

Inter-Poet Conversation

There is an inter-poet conversation, something that we learn from reading many poets’ works, from realizing what it is to be with a poem, to see what is unique about this poet, how it builds on a tradition, breaks it, shows us more of ourselves.

Sound Pleasures

Rhyme and meter vies the reader predictability, orienting the experience. These are sound pleasures. We can still have these today, but not as strongly as children’s rhymes or older poetry. Whitman removed both rhyme and meter, the training wheels, and the bicycle kept going. Scholars argues whether A Song of Myself was poetry, and one critic said, “If this is not poetry, it is something greater than poetry.” As a liberator, Whitman liberated sexuality, social norms, and the poems themselves, from formal constraints. He didn’t just take away, but added things too—anaphora, or the beginning of lines that begin in the same way and work as a foreground to the end of the line. The energy of the poetry also builds—a voice that creates a chant.

When I hear the poem, whatever sound pleasures were offered, I can trust that it will continue in the same way—it leaves the reader susceptible to the rest of the poem.

Compensating for Rhyme and Meter

How do we compensate for rhyme and meter? We can put the rhyme inside the line, an internal rhyme instead of end rhyme.

Revision

Revision means seeing again. Collins doesn’t do that—he works with a poem until it is done. In the morning, reworks with sound rhythms—he makes it sound natural, sound better. Wordsworth called it, “speaking the language of men,” rather than taking a heroic or gothic stance. It’s the emphatic stresses, attending to this the next day, listening to the poem, to how people talk, to other poems. Read it to a dog, and it gets the kind of treatment it needs, but not by changing its meaning.

The Visible Game

Playing the visible game is to turn over cards in the beginning to tell the reader what’s coming, then deciding which other cards to turn and when. There is a moment when the poet knows the end is coming. We can’t go beyond the poems possibilities. There is a turn in the poem, when the meaning is deepened, the double purpose of everything there begins to unfold. Ensure there is a visible game that makes this all possible.

We can measure the beauty of a poem by the silence it creates afterward.

Turns

Am I going to allow a poem to continue in one direction? Most poems are allowed to meander or turn. The is the ability and flexibility of a poem. Changes can be chronological or even change the person addressed.

The ending can reveal a poet has not been up front with their intentions—playing with the reader. This is often a welcome alternative to deep sincerity.

A Poet’s Journey

Poetry came to Billy Collins slowly. As a teenager, he discovered Poetry Magazine, with live poets who spoke to the reader, who used words that didn’t quite go together that sparked in his imagination—even without understanding the whole poem, he found this interesting. He thought maybe he could write a few poems secretly, or maybe get a few poems published in magazines. The most Collins dared expect was to publish a chap book and sell a thousand copies.

Patrick Kavanagh said he started fooling around with words, and at some point it became his life. A poet can be a middle-aged prodigy, slowly getting into poetry. Good work flows to the top, Wallace Stevens reminds us. Things can be rejected for any number of reasons that have nothing to do with our value as a poet or a person. But publishing poems feels like joining a club, making a contribution to something that’s been created over a lot of time. Therefore, read voraciously that we know what’s been said, and how, so we can develop a distinctive style.

Write out others’ poems longhand, with an actual pen. Say them out loud. This connects us to the act of creating poetry. At some point, the poetry moves into the center of our lives. For all we do, don’t forget the reader.

Deer in a Cathederal

Sometimes I like to write something that isn’t too full of itself.

A deer walks into a cathederal
not to start a joke, like
the guy who walks into a bar
but on a dare, from his deer buddies
living in the forest to find
why human sacred places are so
different than deer ones.

And sometimes I think the poem was supposed to say something more, have great meaning, or stand up to critics’ glares. Maybe this can be part of the layering process that Collins talks about, finding structure, considering rhyme, deciding what to reveal and what to hold back. My deer lines were inspired by a video clip I saw:

Instead of wandering from room to room (stanza to stanza), I just stuck the reader in one place, to think about a deer in the cathederal, like they’re sitting in the back filming the whole thing. And then I realize I can do that too: put the deer in the cathederal, then cut to the buddies in the yard, then have them all run back to the woods startled.

A deer walks into a cathederal,
heaven can wait.

I pull out my phone, to get a picture
The boys will dream of hunting tonight.

Outside the door, stag buddies cower,
nibbling well trimmed lawn.

My dropped phone startles us all
they gallop, my heart races.

We all have stories
to tell our grandkids.

The structure I chose was closed couplets–because I started that way and it seemed to give me a little more room to play. There’s nothing particularly profound here, except using the white space as silence, it seems to give the reader room to notice how strange it is to have a deer in a cathederal, or a phone, or more concern with what’s outside the cathederal than in it, or the legacies we’re part of.

There seems to be a few things I held back, because saying all that would be too bossy, too interested in telling the reader what to experience.

Poetry is meant to discover the language of the heart. For me, living in a Western state, deer are part of our legacy, the most graceful wildlife we regularly see. Still, I don’t think this says much about the language of the heart, at least there’s nothing written down that even evokes that in me. It’s just having a little fun, finding joy in the day.

What this does for me, however, is gives me a moment to pause, and participate with real things that aren’t quite describable. I suppose a better poem that this one would recognize the tension lines that we feel and why they matter to us, without getting heavy or creating pretensions that distance the reader from the writer.

Jim Harrison: Lost Medicine

Picking up Jim Harrison’s work, there’s a backstory to every poem, and usually one more behind that. In one, he’s handling a medicine bag from when he believe in magic, and rubbing it on the skin of his back that is aching. So the backstory tells the changes in time. And the furthest-back story is about the fates the gods left him to deal with, being a pawn in something he can’t understand. talking about it isn’t as fun as reading it:

Lost Medicine

I lost my medicine bag
from back when I believed
in magic. It's made from a doe's stomach
and holds a universe:
grizzly teeth and claw, stones from Tibet,
the moon, the garden, the beach
where the baby's ashes are buried.
Now I expect this bag to cure my illnesses--
I can't walk and the skin on my back
pulses and moans without a mouth.
The gods exiled me into this loneliness
of pain for their own good reasons.

See how Harrison gets deep without getting heavy?

References:

Collins, B. (2019). A Poet’s Journey. Retrieved September 11, 2019, from https://www.masterclass.com/classes/billy-collins-teaches-reading-and-writing-poetry/chapters/a-poet-s-journey?action=preview&controller=chapters&course_id=billy-collins-teaches-reading-and-writing-poetry&id=a-poet-s-journey&logged_in=true

Harrison, J. (2018). Dead man’s float—West Bloomfield Twp Public Library. Retrieved September 25, 2019, from http://westbloomfield.library.link/portal/Dead-mans-float-Jim-Harrison/1QCmaI_I0lY/