An Evening with Billy Collins

Wearing a black suit and an orange shirt (Halloween was the night before), he looks around the room. “A poetry traffic jam is something I haven’t seen too often,” he sa7s. “This is wonderful.”

“He” is Billy Collins, two-time poet laureate of the United States. I tell my wife he’s one of the three poets in the United States who makes a living from poetry.

“Who are the other two?” she asks.

“I can’t remember their names offhand,” I reply.

We are sitting in the main room of the St. Louis Country Library in Frontenac, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. Billy Collins is giving a poetry reading from his new work, Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems.

More than 800 people are in the room. My wife and I have what is a “package ticket” – two admission tickets and a copy of the book for $20. The volume retails for $16 for the paperback (just over $12 on Amazon), so the package ticket is a good deal.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Tania Runyan’s “How to Read a Poem”

It should be straightforward, right? Reading it is like reading any other piece of text, correct? Well, no, actually, it’s not. And actually, yes, it is.

"It" is a poem.

Poet Tania Runyan has a suggestion on how to read a poem, or rather, she has six suggestions, all taken from the poem “Introduction to Poetry” by Billy Collins, published in his 1988 collection The Apple That Astonished Paris (it's been republished a couple of times since then). Of course, in the style of poets generally, Runyan has far more in How to Read a Poem than approaches to reading poetry.

But first, her suggestions:

·       Consider the poem’s imagery – “hold it up to the light.”

·       Listen to the sound of the poem.

·       Reflect on all of the pieces that comprise the poem (or, as Collins writes, drop and mosue in and watch him nibble).

·       Look for what creates the Aha!” or “Gotcha!” moment.

·       Study the poem itself, and don’t worry about who the author is or what he or she is trying to do or convey.

·       Let the poem be instead of trying to wring everything possible out of it.

Runyan pulls these suggestions straight from the poem by Collins. What she does with them is one of the best parts of the book. She expands each of the lines of the poem, enlarging one’s understanding, and gives her own example of the suggestion at work. And then she provides several poems in each section for the reader to do the same.

In the process, she provides a wonderful if understated, introduction to reading poetry, and she introduces the reader to poets well known and not-so-well known. Poets whose poems are represented include Tennyson, George Eliot, Emily Bronte, Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Yeats, D.H. Lawrence, Marianne Moore, Robert Browning, Thoreau, Anne Doe Overstreet, Edward Scott Anderson, Carl Sandburg, John Keats, Maureen Doallas, Sara Teasdale, and many more.

“Think of it (How to Read a Poem) as less than an instructional book,” Runyan writes, “and more as an invitation. For the reader new to poetry, this guide will open your senses to the combined craft and magic known as poems. For the well versed, if you will, this book might make you fall in love again.”

Well versed, indeed. The pun suggests another quality of the book, and that is playfulness. How to Read a Poem is above all playful, written by a poet in finds joy in her own work, and joy in poetry generally, and knows how to laugh.

Interested in poetry? Read it. New to poetry? Read it. Well versed? Read it. It’s a wonderful guide by a poet who clearly is in love with her craft and magic.

Related: My review of Tania Runyan's A Thousand Vessels: Poems at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Poets and Poems: Billy Collins and “Aimless Love”

Billy Collins is one of those individuals rare in America – a poet who is successful and popular. The author of 10 collections of poetry, Collins was poet laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003 and of New York State from 2004 to 2006. And this past summer, he substituted for Garrison Keillor on National Public Radio’s program “The Writer’s Almanac.”

Today, he’s publishing Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems. It’s everything a Billy Collins collection of poetry should be, and more: funny, droll, surprising, penetrating, self-deprecating, unexpected. And stories; Collins is always often stories in his poetry.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Top photograph by Karen Arnold via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Take Your Poet to Work Day!

Yes, today, July 17, is the official Take Your Poet to Work Day. The folks over at Tweetspeak Poetry  (which I suppose includes me) created this, and so far it’s caught on in Australia, Holland, the United States and a few places in between. The Atlantic Monthly promoted it. And the Paris Review. And the Rotterdam Poetry Festival.

The idea is to select one of the conveniently created cutouts – Eliot, Dickinson, Poe, Neruda, Teasdale, Rumi or Basho – print it, cut it our and color it, paste to a stick, and then insert your poet somewhere in your work space. And tell a story.

OK, so I don’t do cut-outs. But, as you can see from the photography above, I did bring some poets to work today: Wallace Stevens (a favorite), Billy Collins (close to a favorite), Wendell Berry (a favorite even if he would hate my politics), and Edgar Lee Masters (who has been THE favorite since high school and given the fact he’s lasted this long as my favorite, it’s unlikely he will be dethroned anytime soon).

Oh, yes, that’s the current (July/August) issue of Poetry Magazine. This issue includes three poems by Scott Cairns (I should have brought him to work today, too) and one by James Galvin, among others; an article by the late film critic Roger Ebert; and four remembrances, including one of Richard Wilbur by Donald Hall.

I inserted the four books directly into my work space – the computer screen (yes, that’s Tweetdeck showing on the screen). And in one way or another, all four or these poets, and a few others, have helped me understand the poetry in work – and the poetry at work. That’s the story here. Perhaps that’s always the story here.

So if you’re in the mood for poetic cut-outs, or even if you aren’t, head over to Tweetspeak Poetry and see what’s happening. And it’s not too late to Take Your Poet to Work.