For Billy Collins

I’m sitting here writing a sestina,
thinking about what Billy Collins
said about formal poetry coming back into style.
Here’s what he said: “It’s the road of imitation
that leads to originality.” And I want to believe
him. Really, I do, but I wonder

about it, too. In fact, I wonder
what Billy Collins is writing these days, if a sestina
has graced his page lately. Are we to believe
that the former poet laureate, Billy Collins,
master of free verse (recently subject to imitation
by all young American poets) is actually changing his style?

That is, will the strict structures of verse cramp his style,
will they hamper his free-flowing thoughts? Or, I wonder,
will he be magically freed through his imitation
of Arnaut Daniel and his famed group of sestina-
writing troubadours. Will Collins still sound like Collins
within a nine-hundred-year-old form? I’d like to believe

He will. I’d like to believe
that even beneath the structure, or within it, his style
will be clear. That in spite of the insistent repetition, Collins’s
new poems will be definitively his, and we will all be filled with wonder
at how his sestinas sound more like “Picnic, Lightning” than like our own sestinas,
less like this one, for instance. This one, I’m afraid, isn’t worthy of imitation.

In fact, in many ways, it is an imitation
of some of Collins’s poems, the early ones like “Lines” (which I believe
to be among his best). But this sestina,
in all honesty (and what else is there in poetry), falls short in style,
and I have to admit (for poetry is the language of confession) that I wonder
why I haven’t yet stopped writing. And I would have, except that Collins

said that bit about imitation and originality, and if I could ask Collins
once more (I mean, if the opportunity arose. I wouldn’t want a mere imitation
of that last conversation), I’d tell him that I wonder
exactly what he means by it. I mean, in many ways, I agree. I believe
that a grounding in the classics is an important way to understand style
(and a source of inspiration, too), but I’d ask him about the sestina.

Tell me about this sestina, I’d say to Billy Collins,
about the way that your style, that mine, can stay alive in imitation.
I’d like to believe it can, but still, I wonder.