As part of their first-year required reading, freshmen indulged in Billy Collins’ poetry collection, ‘Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems.’ On Wednesday, Oct. 17, they were treated to a reading and book signing session by Collins. The two-term poet laureate met with The Stony Brook Statesman and The Stony Brook Graduate Magazine to share his perspective on the reading, his visit and his poetry.
When asked why Sailing was chosen for the reading, Collins confessed, ‘I don’t know, I don’t think I was consulted! But I think I would have gone along with the same. [Sailing] is a new and selected poems and what that means is it gathers poems from four other books and then there are some new poems at the end. So, if you will pardon the expression, it’s kind of like the greatest hits.’
He then said, ‘Of the books I’ve written, it provides the broadest overview of my work starting from an earlier book and going to a later book. That’s probably why you get more bang for your buck if you will use that poetic term. It’s a sampling of work from very different periods of my life.’ When asked whether he preferred the reading of his works in a particular order, he said, ‘Well, if you read it backwards, you would see a pattern of improvement, you know, chronologically. So, that would be one way to do it. But since we are all getting worse ‘hellip; the only people who read poetry back to front are editors and reviewers, and maybe, an occasional groupie. Other readers are like me, and I think most of them are. I just get hold of a poem and I just flip through it like a flip book. I’ll see kind of like a catchy title and usually I’ll go for a short poem to take a sampling.’
Collins then provided a glimpse of the publishing process and the ordering of poetry. ‘I just submitted a manuscript about a week ago for the next book, which will be out in the next year, and my editor and I are going back and forth. And there is a lot of attention to the order of the poems and different sections and all that. But it really is an author’s vanity because although I try to structure the books in some way, it’s just fun to do that. To orchestrate, I have an imaginary groupie that is devoted to reading it as an arc. So I create an arc, and I think very few people want to take that ride.’
He explained this arc further, ‘I take all the books I have and put them on the floor of the biggest room in the house face up, needless to say and I kind of walk around I just look at them, in my stocking feet, and I think this guy want to seems to go over here with this guy and they just kind of want to be together. It’s not that they are both about death and nature or something, although they are all about death and nature. He just wants to be with him, and I think she wants to be with this group too. And I just kind of break them into piles, and I realize she doesn’t want to be with them, she wants to be here ‘hellip; but they just become groups and then you refine them.’
He compared the process to a CD, ‘where you can hit cut four and then go back to cut one and just jump around as opposed to playing one album continuously.’
As for when a book feels finished, he said, ‘When I am writing a poem, I am never thinking about the book. A book occurs when I just think I have 60 poems that are aces ‘hellip; it’s just one poem at a time for me.’
Having recited poems to SB students, Collins expounded on the difference between reading a poem aloud and reading it in one’s mind. ‘I think there are some things that are added and some things that are missing. The voice of the poet can help the poem or not. Poets are really frankly not very good at reading their own poems or anybody’s poems for that matter. It’s little like when they used to have silent movies and then they went to talkies, many of the actors who were gorgeous or handsome, had voices like Mickey Mouse ‘hellip; and some poets are like that.’
‘I mean their poets are rhythmic and full of gorgeous sound effects, but they are not very good readers of their poems. So sometimes it’s distracting because the voice you hear in your head is better than the voice you are hearing through this kind of crummy microphone too,’ explained Collins.
Collins then described some of the disadvantages of listening to poetry. ‘The other drawback is that when you are listening to someone read poems, you never know when the poem is going to end. If the poem is short, I tend to say that at poetry readings, ‘here’s a poem that’s 8 or 9 lines.’ Because if it’s on the page you are reading, you can see the ending coming up, and you can make emotional preparation for the big ending.’
But reading poetry aloud has just as many advantages. ‘What’s the positive is personal magnetism, overwhelming charm of the writer, maybe that’s a replacement for these other drawbacks. I think people go to poetry readings not so much to listen to the poet, but to be with like-minded people ‘hellip; if you go to a poetry reading at a library you see all these poetry people come out, and you thought you were the only one in your town to write poetry.’
Collins expressed the beneficial effect of group reading. ‘That’s sort of a plus that it becomes a communal activity and you can run into a fellow of poetry lovers. You get to see different tones, some poets you thought were serious are actually funnier, and some poets you thought were kind of light and amusing are actually darker. I know Charles Simic is one of my favorite poets and I am very happy he is a poet laureate, and his poems are dark and gothic and scary really. But the first time I heard him read, I could see that there was this wry irony bubbling in the back of it and he was kind of enjoying scaring people. So it gave me a really different take and added to my appreciation.’
To be continued ‘hellip;
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