A Nation's Poet: Billy Collins

Despite his standing as former U.S. Poet Laureate, Billy Collins is no stranger to the scathing red pen—even at age 74.

Unlike most, who no longer fall victim to scrupulous grading after graduation, Mr. Collins regularly submits his work to his close friend, trusted advisor and fellow poet George Green. The men will pass about 60 poems between them every two years—it’s the length of time it takes Mr. Collins to finish a book of poetry, including one he will read from on Sunday at Guild Hall in East Hampton—and no matter what, each is returned to the author with a letter grade.

And if his mark is lower than he thinks he deserves, Mr. Collins does not shy away from grade grubbing. In fact, he spends long amounts of time debating with Mr. Green, hoping to earn back extra points. Sometimes he wins, sometimes he loses.

“Most of the time, he confirms all my suspicions about how good a poem is,” Mr. Collins quipped.

Poetry has surrounded Mr. Collins since he was a child. His mother, Katherine, a college dropout, grew up in rural Canada, where traditional schooling included memorizing poetry, a strategy frowned upon today, he said.

“As part of her talk, she’d slip into poetry at times,” the Westchester resident recalled during a telephone interview last week from his second home in Florida. “If it was really cold, she’d have lines from Shakespeare. I was used to poetry before I even knew what poetry was. I was hearing as a toddler, really, and as an infant, the sounds of poetry.”

His early exposure did not translate to paper and pen until Mr. Collins was in high school. Writing, he said, became a welcome outlet for his subjectivity and emotions. “Part of the appeal is the suddenness and compactness of a poem,” he said. “If you read a novel, it’ll take you a week or more to read it. But if you read a poem, it happens in an explosive way. It only takes about 45 seconds to read a lyric poem.”

After high school, Mr. Collins attended College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in English. He then attended the University of California at Riverside, eventually completing a doctorate in romantic poetry. He began teaching English literature at Lehman College in the Bronx, though it would be years before he published his first book of poetry, “The Apple That Astonished Paris,” in 1988.

“[One of my colleagues] said after one of my readings, ‘When I first met you, you were a professor who happened to be a poet. In that time, you became a poet who happened to be a professor,’” he said, adding, “Out of the cocoon of the professor came the butterfly of the poet.”

For every poem, Mr. Collins writes from the top and works his way to the end, always beginning with the first line. He is constantly searching for the final word, and he said he simply knows when he has reached it. “The ending has to achieve two things,” he said. “It has to achieve my sense of, ‘I don’t want to say any more,’ but it also has to achieve my intuition that the reader doesn’t want to hear any more—mutual satisfaction.”

Mr. Collins is not a ritualistic person when it comes to writing. He does not have a routine or a spot where he works best, although looking out a window does ignite a reaction with “verbal potential,” he said.

“It’s important for me to be trained to be interested in the periphery, instead of looking down the street where you need to go,” he explained. “You come to understand that there’s no such thing as a distraction. What seem to be distractions are often signals. They could be a starting point for a poem. It’s a kind of open-minded, calm disposition that leads itself to writing.

Last summer, Mr. Collins attended a writer’s colony in Umbria, Italy, at Civitella Ranieri, a 15th-century castle—not a terrible place to live and write for a few weeks. But it was not exactly his idea of a great time. Mr. Collins is not a recluse who locks himself in his study all day and night—“You’d go insane,” he said. He writes in the morning, if he remembers, he said, and once he is in the zone, it takes him at least 20 minutes to finish any given poem.

He was filled with trepidation when he signed up for the block of time in Italy.

“I didn’t know how I would handle, basically, enforced creativity, but I came out with 12 poems—a record for me,” he said. “I wrote every day for no reason, and it was a great experience.”

What most call “writer’s block,” Mr. Collins titles “I’m not writing right now.” “It’s a bit like how actors don’t like to say ‘Macbeth.’ Writers don’t like to say ‘writer’s block,’” he said. “Optimistically, I’m preparing for my next poem. I think boredom is often a prelude to creativity.”

Billy Collins will read from and discuss his poetry on Sunday, July 12, at 8 p.m. at Guild Hall in East Hampton. Tickets start at $25, or $23 for members. For more information, call (631) 324-0806, or visit guildhall.org.

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