Collins @ Rollins

Last Thursday, a couple of friends of mine from school and I took members of the Irving Society--that's the Academy's creative writing club, which I advise--to see Billy Collins give a lecture at Rollins College.

Of course, I'm always worried about being late, so we were an hour early, even after we stopped for dinner at a deli in Winter Park. We spent much of the hour in a gazebo on the lake, talking while Jess took pictures (that I swear will end up in an Academy publication of some sort). When we finally headed over to the lecture hall, I found myself feeling a bit strange--it felt like old days at Writers in the Gallery, but I wasn't part of that group at the reading, if you know what I mean.

Collins's talk was about literary influences and, specifically, about the writers that influenced him. He brought what he called his "bag of oeuvre."

He didn't start with literature, though. He started with an article he wrote for the Wall Street Journal about the influence of the Looney Tunes on his writing. Yes, the Looney Tunes.

Describing influence as chlorine (does it kill off what's bad? does it clarify the murky waters of expression? he didn't say), Collins described a world "released from the law of Newton," a world where anything is possible. A world where you could run off the edge of a cliff and be suspended mid-air until you made the mistake of looking down.

He described his mother, who had committed a great deal of poetry to memory and who would be struck by "spasms of poetry." Anything might provoke six or eight lines of Shakespeare, or Psalms.

He read several short ("clever") poems by Richard Brautigan, including this one:

     Widow's Lament
It's not quite cold enough
to go borrow some firewood
from the neighbors.

and this one:

     Love Poem
          It's so nice
to wake up in the morning
          all alone
and not have to tell somebody
          you love them
when you don't love them
          any more.

I should have said clever and bitter, I suppose.

He then read a collection of his own early work that had been influenced by Brautigan, including "Falling Asleep," "Twisting Time," "Motel Parking Lot," "Breaking Up," "Koan in the Rain," and "Pupil." And this one (I'm guessing about the line breaks):

     Refrigerator Light
The minute she slams the door,
I stop thinking about her.

Again, clever (and bitter).

Where Collins is going here, though, is to a discussion of metaphor--he tells the one-liner about tenor and vehicle; you know, the one about the opera singer. He describes the move inside the metaphor as being like the slip into reality (a door opens, it's the real world which, to the cartoon world, seems unnatural) from the fantasy in the Looney Tunes.

The distinction between vehicle and tenor seems, for Collins, an arbitrary one. What is the symbol? What is being represented? The two positions seem interchangeable, as if the metaphor can suddenly take on a literal meaning, and the literal thing suddenly becomes a symbol.

What Collins is aiming for here is what he calls the "pleasure of disorientation."

Collins then turned to a poem that he had influenced him a great deal in that it taught him how develop momentum (and therefore distance) in a poem: Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison." Coleridge writes,

          . . . and sometimes
'Tis well to be bereft of promis'd good,
That we may life the soul, and contemplate
With lively joy the joys we cannot share.

Collins points out the "perhaps" of the imagined journey the poet takes with his friends:

          Now, my friends emerge
Beneath the wide wide Heaven--and view again
The many-steepled tract magnificent
Of hilly fields and meadows, and the sea,
With some fair bark, perhaps, whose sails light up
The slip of smooth clear blue betwixt two Isles
Of purple shadow!

(As an aside, Collins recalls the use of the word perhaps in Madame Bovary, asking, if Flaubert doesn't know, who does?)

Collins moves then to the rook in the poem's conclusion, the bird (imagined) completing a triangle between poet and friend, between real journey and imagined one. Here, he turns to Whitman's violation of poetic decorum ("For once, come serve the Muse, and merge in verse . . .") and to Kenneth Koch's "You Were Wearing" ("my George Washington, Father of His Country, shoes"), remarking about poems that show us what is indeed possible--what we thought was impossible--in poetry.

After some selections from Ron Padgett's work, he moved to his own poem "Canada" from Nine Horses. Notable here is the way that the extensive list of book titles takes control of the poem--and the way that Collins allows it to:

You are the shelves of hooks in a lakeside cottage:

Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh,

A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson,

Anne of Avonlea by L. M. Montgomery,

So You’re Going to Paris! by Clara E. Laughlin,

and Peril Orer the Airport, one

of the Vicky Barr Flight Stewardess series

by Helen Wills whom some will remember

as the author of the Cherry Ames Nurse stories.

What has become of the languorous girls

who would pass the long limp summer evenings reading

Cherry Ames, Student Nurse, Cherry Ames, Senior Nurse,

Cherry Ames, Chief Nurse, and Cherry Ames, Flight Nurse?

The titles are real, he says, and come from the dust jacket flap of a book on a shelf in a cabin on a Canadian lake very much like the one in the poem.

He reads poems by Matthew Dickman and Bob Hickok, including Hickok's "Michigan."

In the final turn of the evening, he looks to Emerson's comparison of writing to a sort of ice skating, as an action in which we are (at least) slightly out of control. What was necessary, what is necessary, is the self-consciousness of the poet, the awareness of himself in the poem, the awareness of having created something--and, at the same time, of not being entirely in control of that act. The sonnet, he says, is remarkable in this regard, for in it, the poet must turn in the final six (or two) and comment on his own work--in the conclusion of the sonnet, he says, we see the poet blushing.