Interviews

Close Examination
From the September/October 2001 issue of Book magazine.

With some help from Looney Tunes, Billy Collins turns his sharp eye to the quotidian -- with sparkling results.

At 60, Billy Collins could look back on his six successful books of poetry and call it a day. Or, as entertaining a performer as he is, he might have chosen to continue on the poetry-reading circuit as an elder observer of life's amusing strangeness. But like a character in one of his own poems, Collins doesn't do the predictable. In June the poet considered the nation's most popular was appointed its next poet laureate.

Dharma by Billy Collins The way the dog trots out the front door every morning without a hat or an umbrella, without any money or the keys to her doghouse never fails to fill the saucer of my heart with milky admiration. Who provides a finer example of a life without encumbrance -- Thoreau in his curtainless hut with a single plate, a single spoon? Gandhi with his staff and his holy     diapers? Off she goes into the material world with nothing but her brown coat and her modest blue collar, following only her wet nose, the twin portals of her steady breathing, followed only by the plume of her tail. If only she did not shove the cat aside every morning and eat all his food what a model of self-containment she would be, what a paragon of earthly detachment. If only she were not so eager for a rub behind the ears, so acrobatic in her welcomes, if only I were not her god. From Sailing Around the Room, copyright © by Billy Collins. Used by permission of Random House, Inc.

Collins is clear about what he considers his most important achievement. "Most gratifying for me," he says, "more than winning this or that poetry prize, is hearing that people have been brought back to poetry by reading my work. I think there are many people who are ready to return to poetry. They had poetry in school, and either their love for it was beaten out of them by bad teachers, or they just marginalized poetry the way many people do. But I think there is a very basic need to get back to it, perhaps in some kind of spiritual sense, but also just as a brief form of verbal engagement and entertainment with another consciousness, and also with your own consciousness."

Collins's poems, which often present a day in the life of a tired, well-meaning regular guy looking at the common events around him, always manage to snag serious ideas. But they represent the exception to the rule that to be serious is to be confessional, difficult, and abstract. In the new Sailing Alone Around the Room, Collins offers a sample of earlier work from The Apple That Astonished Paris (1988), Questions About Angels (1991), The Art of Drowning (1995), and Picnic, Lightning (1998), along with 20 new poems. It's a generous helping, and Random House -- his new publisher, after three books with the University of Pittsburgh Press -- was justifiably excited well before the poet laureate appointment was announced. "I believe if you look at crude sales figures," says Collins's editor, Daniel Menaker, "he may have sold more books than any poet alive, or anyone since [Robert] Frost."

For Collins, the preceding three years were marked by copyright wrangling between the University of Pittsburgh Press and Random House, and no new books of his appeared. "I just have the sense," says Collins, who reports that another entire collection of poems is ready to go, "that the rest of my literary career is a series of airplanes circling the airport, waiting to land." (Stephen Whited)