Bookwormy Wednesdays: Billy Collins

    

Hi everybody and welcome to Bookwormy Wednesdays. For these posts, I will write about books and authors, obviously. Today, I plan to talk about Billy Collins because it’s poetry week AND I got to actually meet him while I was at school in the D.C. It was awesome! I have copy and pasted my blog post for class (my professor had us do English portfolio blogs) onto here so enjoy!

 

“I’m really kind of at a loss for words, so just bear with me here. Running the Billy Collins field trip was quite an experience. He is one of my favorite contemporary poets so when I saw that he was doing a reading here in the DC, I knew I had to go. I also thought my fellow English 208ers would like to go see him, especially since we read his stuff in class, so I suggested that we go on a field trip. Everything surprisingly worked out well. The only thing that went amiss was how a few students missed out.

 

Reflecting on the actual experience though, it was surreal…I loved the poetry readings—my favorites were the one about the lanyard and the one about how everyone says to him “I see a poem coming.” I guess it’s because I can relate. I remember how my little brother would make all these homemade gifts for my mother and people are always telling me what I should write a poem or story about.

 

Asking Billy Collins a question was pretty nerve-wracking, but I was curious to hear his answer. I was watching the interpreter make his border collie face and I thought “why do people say the beauty of literature is lost in translation? If anything, it adds to the beauty,” so I asked him what he thought about his poems being translated into ASL and whether he thought it captured something that his words did not. He gave a pretty interesting answer too.

 

Later, we had the opportunity to actually meet Billy Collins! I got my favorite poem by him signed and we even got a picture with him.”

 

My favorite poem by him is “Forgetfulness”, which is kind of depressing but true. Everything floats down the river Lethe and blah, blah, blah. I’m supposed to be teaching you about poetry so I’ll copy and paste his poem “Introduction to Poetry” onto here. I even taught this in class so hopefully I do a good job explaining it.

 

I ask them to take a poem

and hold it up to the light

like a color slide

 

or press an ear against its hive.

 

I say drop a mouse into a poem

and watch him probe his way out,

 

or walk inside the poem's room

and feel the walls for a light switch.

 

I want them to waterski

across the surface of a poem

waving at the author's name on the shore.

 

But all they want to do

is tie the poem to a chair with rope

and torture a confession out of it.

 

They begin beating it with a hose

to find out what it really means.

 

So basically it’s saying that we should experience poetry instead of simply trying to understand it. We can never truly understand a poem in the author’s perspective so we should try to develop our own understanding of it. Ironically, I’m doing exactly what the author is warning me not to do. I don’t think people like to read poetry his way though. People like to understand what the poem means to the author so that they feel like they’ve solved a puzzle. Plus, their freshman English teacher tells them to torture poems so most people aren’t exposed to this type of analysis. English majors are exposed to this, but then they are told to analyze poetry the other way.

 

Billy Collins has a lot of great poems to torture so I enjoy reading his stuff. Most of his poems are humorous on the surface, but if you look closer, they have an interesting deeper meaning. I recommend his book “Sailing Alone Around the Room” as it has a lot of his more well-known poems from his other anthologies along with some newer poetry.

 

I really wanted to insert the picture of me with Billy Collins and my professors, but Blogger was mean and wouldn't let me. :-(