Poet Billy Collins Shared His Tips on Writing During a Reading at UCSB
Melinda Palacio -- February 17, 2007
Billy Collins is our whimsical, twice-appointed United States Poet Laureate. Santa Barbara's own poet laureate, Barry Spacks, introduced Collins to a sold-out crowd at UCSB's Campbell Hall, February 11. Spacks lauded Collins for making the discipline of verse fun and popular again. But the truth behind Collins's playfulness is that he's serious about his craft, even though he makes us believe he's merely having fun, recording the quixotic world around him.
To hear Collins read his work, one expects him to eat dessert before breakfast, wear pajamas to public readings, and skip to the podium. He said that after he was in his 30's, he gave himself permission to use humor to sell poetry. It's been such a successful formula for the popular poet whose words dance on the page.
In addition to delighting the audience, Collins offered several tips to the writers in the room. Collins once found himself reading an instruction manual on how to write fiction. The manual listed several do's and don'ts on writing. Why the poet found himself reading about how to write fiction remains either a mystery or a secret desire from the Poet Laureate who considers prose a lower form of art than poetry. "I'm always defining poetry against prose," said Collins, "poetry is a bird and prose is a potato."
However, the rule that caught Collins's fancy was 'Never use the word 'suddenly' to create tension. He gave several examples of poor prose that began with cheap shots, such as 'Suddenly, shots rang out'. And, suddenly, Collins read a poem that succeeded at making fun of the rule by suddenly saturating the audience with clever usage of the adverb. Collins, suddenly, gave permission to all the writers in the room to reacquaint themselves a long discarded word.
Susan Chiavelli and Billy Collins
Our poet's gift to us is to revisit all that is neglected, forgotten, or simply overused expressions, such as his poem, "Oh, MyGod," about penitent teenage girls. The satire dripping from his straight faced delivery was followed by the other trope writers are asked to forgo at all costs, the cliché. "Clichés are the enemy of the writer," Collins said, "but also clichés are fun to play with." In his poem "Adage," Collins tells us that "Love is the early bird who is better late than never."
His 'cheap advice' to his Creative Writing classes is his dog trick. "If you find yourself stuck in a poem, have a dog come in," said the 66-year-old poet. "Dogs cheer you up, get you out of rut. But it's easy to slide into sentimentality."
Collins's new dog poem, "The Revenant," is anything but sentimental. It anthropormises a dogs who utterly despises his owner. The dog, whose owner put him to sleep, comes back to complain to the owner of all the humiliation he endured as part of being an obedient pet. The dog reveals
that everyone here can read and write
the dogs in poetry, the cats and all the others in prose.
funny men John Cleese and Billy Collins
The final instruction to poets and writers was a sin most good writers are guilty of: stealing. "It's all some kind of stealing," said the New York City native. "The most important emotion for a poet is jealousy. Jealousy is lke the little propeller under the boat driving creativity."
In the signature poem from his new collection, The Trouble with Poetry we find that for Collins,
the trouble with poetry isIn the last two stanzas Collins made excellent use of a great steal from Lawrence Ferlinghetti:
that it encourages the writing of more poetry,
more guppies crowding the fish tank,
more baby rabbits
hopping out of their mothers into the dewy grass.
And what an unmerry band of thieves we are,
cut-purses, common shoplifters,
I thought to myself
as a cold wave swirled around my feet
and the lighthouse moved its megaphone over the sea, which is an image I stole directly
from Lawrence Ferlinghetti--
to be perfectly honest for a moment--
the bicycling poet of San Francisco
whose little amusement park of a book
I carried in a side pocket of my uniform
up and down the treacherous halls of high school.