Fayetteville : Poet: Felt unfit as laureate
Posted on Wednesday, February 8, 2006
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/News/145164/
FAYETTEVILLE — Billy Collins often looked at the images of America’s greatest poets in his Washington D. C. office and felt out of place, he said Tuesday at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.
Collins, a self-described “middle-class” poet, served two terms as the United States’ poet laureate, a position appointed annually by the librarian of Congress. The framed photographs of his predecessors, including Robert Penn Warren, William Carlos Williams and Gwendolyn Brooks, hang on a wall in the laureate’s Library of Congress office, he said.
“When I stood at my laureate desk,” Collins said, “I could see this wall of laureates and they seemed to be looking at me, particularly Richard Wil- bur, and they were saying, ‘What the hell are you doing here ?’
“ I felt like someone was going to come in and say, ‘You’re not the laureate.’”
Collins discussed the creative process and his duties as laureate with two dozen UA students Tuesday morning in Giffels Auditorium in Old Main. On Monday night, Collins read from his work before an audience of about 650 at UA’s student union.
Collins, who has described his poetry as “suburban” and “domestic,” said Tuesday that he hesitated when he was asked to write and read a poem to a joint session of Congress on the first anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001.
“I write about salt shakers and boats, not huge historical cataclysms,” he said.
Collins told the students that poetry is the “most self-indulgent and narcissistic” form of writing. But good poetry gives attention and thought to the reader’s feelings, he said.
“It must be assured that the reader, if he or she plays a role in your writing, and I hope they do, is not interested in you but your poetry,” he said.
Collins served from 2001 to 2003 as the United States’ poet laureate. This year he’s finishing his term as poet laureate of New York state.
His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review and Atlantic Monthly.
He appeared at UA in conjunction with last year’s 25 th anniversary of the UA Press, which began in May 1980 in the office of longtime director Miller Williams.
In 1988, under Williams’ leadership, the press published The Apple That Astonished Paris, Collins’ self-described “first book of real poems.” The press is reissuing the book this spring with a new preface by the author.
Collins, a New York City native, is a distinguished professor of English at Lehman College, a public liberal arts college in the Bronx that’s affiliated with the City University of New York.
He revealed Tuesday that he is inspired by Chinese poetry for its “clarity, humility, and simplicity of the language.”
“It’s just a way of clearing my head,” he said.
Revision is “highly overrated,” he said.
“Revision should be taking out, not adding,” he said. “Revisions that add things are usually disastrous, because it looks like something put together with duct tape.”
Collins advised that “if a poem’s not going well, stop writing it.” “ Go cook some good soup or something, ” he said. He doesn’t set aside time during the day to write, Collins said. “I have no work habits whatsoever,” he said. “I write when it comes to me. I have no time I spend at a desk. I’m not a good role model, but that’s the way it goes, I guess.”
To contact this reporter : cbranam@arkansasonline. com