There are moments in a conversation with US Poet Laureate Billy Collins when he sounds just like his poems. When fantasizing, for example, about the most useful criticism he could offer many of his workshop students, he deadpans in his low, drowsy reading voice: ‘Stop writing. You are not cut out for this. Please, do something else.’

His statements favour directness and clarity, as do his poems, which he describes as composed from a ‘simple palette.’ Perhaps by way of explanation, he says he often reads from an anthology of Chinese poems before sitting down to write his own work ‘just because of its simplicity.’

Absent in his directness is any note of the pretentious or pedantic. This is again like his poems which, he says, ‘write against the posturing’ of a certain kind of poetry that over-exalts itself or employs a grand, all-knowing tone.

And finally: his poems are funny. And so is he. He lets it be known, however, that he is no glorified comedian. ‘I just see humour as the correct view of the world,’ he explains, ‘because the world is so full of incongruities and imbalances and absurdities. So humour is not something I’m ‘putting on.’ Humour is the lens I’m looking through. It’s a way of perceiving things — which is not the same as making a joke.’

It does seem, though, that Collins is often reduced to the label ‘funny poet.’ When American poet Jorie Graham introduced her first poem at the Coffee House reading series at the Troubadour in London, she warned, ‘Tonight the gravedigger is in town. If you want ‘funny’ you’ll have to
wait until next week when Billy Collins is here.’ Nevertheless it’s a label that seems to work in his favour, apparently explaining, at least in part, his popularity among readers on this side of the Atlantic who often say his poems appeal to the British aesthetic.

When asked about this, he looks surprised and seems to negate the statement. ‘Well, I wasn’t aware that my poems did appeal to the British. I know this new book [Nine Horses] is selling well, but in fact when I read in England or Ireland, I notice that some of my poems sound very American. For example, I have a poem in which I mention a state flower, but to a British ear it could easily sound like ‘an estate flower’. But he adds that in general he tries to avoid ‘Americanisms’ and hopes the simplicity of his syntax and diction makes his poems ‘a little more universal’ than they might otherwise be.

He is not surprised to hear that his relative fame in the UK is an anomaly, and that many American poets he would consider household names are not known at all here. He knows the reverse is true too, and acknowledges that the cross-cultural flow of British and American poetry is poor in general. In his view, English, Scottish and Welsh poetry tends to be obscured by Irish poetry in the US. He explains, ‘Irish poetry has become quite popular in America and is widely read, probably because of Seamus Heaney who, by fulfilling a certain image of the Irish Poet, partly accounts for the popularity of people like Paul Muldoon, Eavan Boland, Eamon Grennan and Paul Durcan, many of whom teach at American universities.’

He also attributes the knowledge gap to publishing, saying ‘A lot of British poets just aren’t published in the States very widely. Whereas in the 1960’s, Al Alvarez came out with an anthology called The New Poetry, which was published by Penguin and widely available in the States. That introduced people like Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes and lots of others to an American audience.’

He adds that ‘Carol Ann Duffy is probably one of the most popular poets in England, but she’s virtually unknown in America. And Simon Armitage is another. People who keep up with poetry would probably know of them. But the market in America is so flooded with poetry — there are so many books of poetry that come out every year — that it’s enough to keep up with the American poetry scene let alone the British.’ He says he intends to discuss the problem, Poet Laureate to Poet Laureate, with Andrew Motion, who, he laments, ‘is another poet who’s not really known in the US. He’s known for his biography of Larkin, and by people who know who the poet laureate of Britain is, but it’s hard to think of any English poet who is alive and widely read.’

But, of course, ‘known’ is a relative word, especially when talking about poetry. He attributes poetry’s dwindling readership in the US to insufficient education early on in school, a conclusion drawn by many in this country too. Indeed, one of Collins’s chief contributions as US Poet Laureate has been Poetry 180, a project which assigns each of the 180 days in the American school year a poem — to be read in assemblies, in the classroom or simply to be posted on a bulletin board. The poems are contained on the Poetry 180 website — which gets one to two million hits a month — and also in an anthology by the same name, a book which he hopes will be published in the UK by Picador sometime in the future.

Has Poetry 180 worked? ‘Hundreds of schools are using it,’ he says. ‘Sometimes they don’t read a poem everyday; they might read a poem every Monday, for example.’ He adds, ‘High school teachers love it. They say it’s a really good way of getting students interested in poetry. Because if you put out 180 hooks, it would be a hopelessly dense student who fails to respond to all 180. It gets students over ‘poem phobia’. And it rinses out the position, ‘I hate poetry. Poetry sucks’.

He chose every one of the poems, all of which can be described as contemporary and accessible, himself. He describes the process of sitting in Poets House, a vast poetry library in New York City, day after day, by saying, ‘It took a long, long time. I had to read a lot of bad poems.’

On the subject of bad poetry, he disagrees with one of his predecessors in the position of US Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky, who held the title in the late 1990’s and used to assert that even bad poetry was good for poetry, for it raised awareness and gave people pleasure. But Collins refutes this unapologetically: ‘Bad poetry is bad for poetry. The trouble with poetry is that it’s too easy to write. It doesn’t require any knowledge. You can’t just pick up a cello and start playing. And you can’t just get some oil paints and start painting with them, you have to know how to mix them. There’s knowledge involved in playing the piano or making a piece of sculpture or dancing. But poetry just requires a piece of paper. And that’s why there’s so much bad stuff around.’

He pauses and tries to remember a quote on this subject, but cannot attribute it and only manages to paraphrase it: ‘If you went to a piano concert and it became painfully and immediately clear in the first couple of minutes or seconds that the pianist didn’t know how to play the piano, you would walk out, or you would ask for your money back. But we go to poetry readings and sit through excruciating boredom sometimes and just take it as a matter of course.’

Poetry readings are another bugbear for him. In an interview three years ago, he described them as a closed circuit: poets coming to hear other poets read, often with ulterior motives. Has his view on this changed? ‘Well, this sounds immodest, but I think some of my readings are bringing in a broader audience who don’t necessarily have a vested interest in writing poetry, but I still think generally there is that ‘closed circuit’ aspect. And this is especially evident in open mic readings. Basically what these open mic readers are doing there is waiting to get up and read themselves, not actually listening to the featured poets. Or they’re there to make connections, to hand the poet a manuscript, for example.’

If this sounds like biting the hand that feeds him, it is not the only time he does so; he is equally disillusioned with writing workshops, though teaching them at Lehman College in the Bronx, New York City, is how he makes part of his living. (He also teaches literature at Lehman, which he enjoys more. ‘I prefer subject matter to student poetry.’) He views writing as a solo activity, and finds the collaborative aspect of a workshop unnatural. He himself never attended a workshop, and claims never to have had any mentors.

When asked if he sees any value at all in creative writing degrees, he says, ‘Yes. They create a wider, smarter readership of poetry.’ But don’t they falsely encourage students to believe that they, too, will become well-known as poets, or have teaching jobs? Collins shrugs. ‘It’s the same kind of argument as teaching kids in inner cities basketball and letting them dream of being an NBA basketball star.’

Such comments suggest Collins to be a hardboiled New Yorker of some other era, an image that seems further supported by the tough-guy drink he orders: ‘Jameson, straight up.’ Born in Manhattan in 1941, he is in fact a lifelong New Yorker. His father was what the English might call an upwardly mobile working class man, who later started a middle class business and moved his family out to the wealthier suburbs. Perplexed by Collins’s ambition to pursue a PhD in literature and teach, his father saw it as a step down. (He didn’t live to see Collins become Poet Laureate.) Collins says, ‘When I think of my father’s reaction to my chosen profession, I think of that quote by Thomas Jefferson, which goes something like, ‘My father was a farmer so that I could be a lawyer, so that my son could be a poet.’ He says he met with other forms of discouragement on his road to becoming a poet, including a priest at his Catholic college who dismissed his poems in the college literary magazine with, ‘Anything you write before the age of 26 doesn’t count.’ He also remembers being interviewed by the college president for a radio show at around the same time. The college president told Collins, ‘Of course you’ll never win the Pulitzer prize with these poems,’ and continued on as though his judgement were self-evident. Collins explains, ‘Now, I haven’t won the Pulitzer prize, and I probably never will, but I felt like saying, ‘I’ll show you, you bastard!’ He says these were positive turning points in his life because ‘it’s good to be discouraged. I’ve responded better to discouragement than to pats on the back. Because they’re challenges.’

One challenge he has not risen to is the novel, a genre that sometimes tempts poets out of poetry for a while. On this, he says, ‘You have to be interested in other people to be a novelist. But to be a poet you just have to be obsessively interested in yourself, looking out your own window at the world.’ Is that why so many of his poems contain the image of the window, and the speaker looking out of it? ‘Yes, it’s sort of an epistimological position — standing in an interior and looking out at the world. Which I then try to make fun of in the poem.’

Does he feel, as a poet, that he is eternally outside the action, looking in? ‘Yeah. That’s probably right. It’s probably an image that comes from the idea of the gazer. It’s a figure lifted from British Romanticism. That is to say a fellow who falls asleep in a field, who watches clouds and daydreams — a kind of Keatsian langorous figure.’

By the end of the interview, he looks more Keatsian than he might realize. He has done readings and interviews all week, and his interview with me is sandwiched between two others in the same day. As I pack up and get ready to say goodbye, we make small talk about his hotel, The Gore. I tell him that I have bad associations with it: my father-in-law fainted there a year ago on a hot summer’s evening. He responds with a classically Billy Collins quip: ‘Was he giving interviews all day?’

Kathryn Maris, Poetry London Listings Editor, has recently published poetry and essays in US publications such as Poetry, Ploughshares, and American Poet. She is currently a poet-in-residence at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, USA.

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