And that's one thing that's sort of slightly ridiculous about being a poet is that gulf between how serious we take ourselves, that self-absorption, and how little anybody else cares about what these activities.

The world is not waiting for anyone's next book, really.

This former U.S. poet laureate has helped make modern poetry accessible to the masses with his gift for humor and relatability.

Tonight on the A-list, I talk with Billy Collins.

In the world of poetry, Billy Collins is a bit of a rarity.

He's been called the class clown of modern American poetry, and it's a role he seems quite comfortable in.

In a field that's dominated by perceptions of pretension and complexity, Collins work is a refreshing take on what poetry has to offer for the average American reader.

He's not afraid to poke fun at his own craft, though his skill and humor have allowed him to gain both critical respect and mass appeal in equal doses.

I caught up with Billy while he was visiting the university of the South in Sewanee to learn a little more about how this sarcastic wordsmith rose to unprecedented levels of poetic stardom.

Well, Billy, welcome to the A-list.

We're thrilled you're here.

Very good.

Thank you very much for having me on the A-list.

Well, we're glad that.

The B List.

Not the B List.

No, that's for next season.

We're glad you're at Sewanee, though, and we were able to catch up with you.

So let's start where everybody starts at the beginning.

Where did you grow up?

Oh, I grew up when I was born in Manhattan on West 30th Street in the French hospital.

That's going to take a long time.

And now I live with my parents only child in New York City until I was maybe 12 or 13.

And then we moved to the adjacent suburbs of Westchester County.

So I've lived pretty much all my adult life, you know, within, you know, no farther than 30 minutes from Grand Central Station.

And when did you get a pension for writing or know that you were even good at it?

Well, you know, I remember I have a kind of a erm memory of driving in the back of my parents car.

And this is one of the great places for an only child because there are no siblings to argue with or fight over a toy.

So you're actually kind of being chauffeured by these two adults around the world.

And we were driving up the East Side Highway in New York.

I was, I don't know, seven, nine, something like that.

And there was a sailboat tacking up the East River.

And I, I had a literary reaction to this.

I wanted to write something down.

I don't know what nine very long forgotten it.

So I remember asking my mother for something to write with.

And I committed my first act of literature in the back of my parent's car.

Then I didn't write until I was a teenager, and then I just wrote the terrible stuff.

You write as a teenager.

You know, someone said that we're all born with 300 bad poems in us, and high school is a great place to get them.

Get rid of them if you can.

So and then I really didn't I wasn't taking poetry very either.

I wasn't taking it seriously or I didn't have the courage to take myself seriously, or I didn't have the courage to let people know how seriously I was taking myself.

So it really was until just a surly wine for a bit.

It wasn't till I was in my thirties that I started figuring stuff out.

Who have been your greatest influences?

I know a lot of people compare you to Robert Frost.

Well, Frost is just someone that I, you know, he came to my college and he was a god.

He was about two years away from his death.

And he just it just seemed that that he always looked like that, you know, you couldn't imagine of being a baby or or being on roller skates.

You know, he was just monumental, a kind of Mount Rushmore visage.

And he's the man.

He's the great teacher of craft.

He's the great teacher of starting small and ending with something much bigger and doing it without you knowing it exactly.

So he's I think I don't think anybody could deny some kind of influence from him, but I suppose more insensibility.

People like Philip Larkin and William MATTHEWS and some of the New York poets like Kenneth Coke.

But I think I just think of influences much more random.

I think there are like dozens of little rivulets that are coming in, you know, that that's hard not to learn from anybody, because when you're asked about influence, it's always, you know, the temptation is to to clean up the past and to suck on your pipe and say, well, yeah, of course, you know, and this this kind of thing.

I wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal about the influence of Looney Tunes, merry melodies, cartoons on my poetry.

I'd say they were as and as influential as.

I don't know, Thomas Hardy.

So it's.

I guess I'll say no more.

Turn it did such a complex issue.

Well, no, it makes sense because I've heard you say you are less inspired by things and irritated by things, which is sometimes impetus for your poetry.

Well, at one way, I suppose one more thing is that there are intentional influences.

I think in those that's when you sit down and you say, I'm going to get I mean, I get serious influenced by this poet.

And for me, that was Coleridge.

Coleridge is what they call his conversation poems.

And all of these poems begin in a domestic setting, like sitting in a room like this or sitting in the backyard or something, and then they begin to imaginatively take off and move into these wider open areas of speculation and hypothetical musings.

So Coleridge taught me how to You'll forgive him for making these comparisons, but we're next to each other in the index, though sometimes.

But he taught me how to create a more expansive meditation and start small and then fly around a bit.

Billy's first collection of poems, Poker Face, was published in 1977, but it really wasn't until the early 1990s that his career began to take off.

He had released three books when his manuscript for Questions about Angels was selected as a winner of the National Poetry Series competition.

It was that honor that allowed him to start building a serious literary reputation.

But in 1997, his appearance on Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion was his invitation into the homes of the masses.

It sounds like it has been a gradual process for you.

This the poetic journey, so to speak.

But was there a point that you remember where you said to yourself or to others, I am a poet?

You know what?

What was the point of your life or your professional career that gave you the confidence to actually say those words?

Well, it never arrived until it arrived.

Coterminous with a phone call I got from the Librarian of Congress saying I was poet laureate.

At that point I thought, okay, now I can say it.

Before that, it was always uncomfortable to say it have carried such odd connotations, mostly negative and mostly conversation.

Stopping it to say, I'm a poet.

It gets you get dull respect, you get, oh, poetry or the other as Huh?

That's interesting.

Our daughter writes poetry, you know, she's nine and Tiffany writes poetry and I've always.

Here's my little less fete escalier What you want to say later that you had what you think of later, which would have said so your daughter Tiffany, writes poetry.

That's interesting.

And you're a hedge fund guy.

Did you say that?

That's fascinating, because my son Kevin is four, was playing with some change the other day on the floor.

It's interesting, those connections.

It's amazing that.

Yeah, it's just a small, wonderful world, isn't it?

Well, I've got to be going now.

I.

So now it's hard to say If you say you're a novelist, that means you write novels.

If you say you're a carpenter or a carpenter, you say you're a poet.

It's sort of a self bestowing of some kind of honorific winged capacity you have, you know, because there are so many connotations to the term.

But but you say when you became poet laureate, which wasn't until 2001, but in 1999, New York Times declared you the best modern American poet in America.

So, you know, someone had to discover you before before actually name poet laureate if.

You're called poet by, you know, there's sort of a critical mass of number of people who have recognized that you're a poet because you write poetry, then it becomes easier.

But to go around announcing to people who don't know you're a poet, that you're a poet, I mean, that's the difference.

So what do you say you are when when you're at a cocktail party and someone says, What do you do?

Oh, I teach high school chemistry.

Yeah.

They go, Oh, really?

And my our daughter Tiffany just exploded.

Just blew up, like.

Mixing mustard with some nitrogen oxide.

Yeah.

Bless her heart.

So when did you realize that you were funny?

Well, I. I knew I was funny because my father was funny.

And so humor was just part of the the talk at our house between my father and I, my mother being the the kind of the the victim of all this joking.

You know, she was the long suffering, the long suffering woman in the kitchen doing her stuff and praying and all that.

And we were horsing around a lot, so.

But of course, I didn't think that there was a place for humor in poetry.

Humor ended with the English Romantics.

There was plenty of humor before that.

But the Romantics figured out a way to substitute.

Instead of humor and sex, they substituted the landscape.

Which is strikes me as a rather bad deal, but a deal nonetheless.

It was.

And it wasn't really until people like for me, Philip Larkin, particularly Larkin, Charles Simic, other poets showed me that you could be funny without being silly, you know, without being a silly goose, a rhyming clown.

And you could be.

And in the case of Simic and Philip Larkin, you could be very dark and humorous.

So that was a big door that swung open.

And I had permission to to be funny.

I was always funny, but I was pretending to be miserable because I thought that's what poetry required.

It is that willingness to utilize humor as well as the conversational nature of his work that have made Billy Collins such a sensation in the literary world.

His poems tend to focus on everyday observations, placing the reader in a setting that is both familiar and accessible.

And though his humor is a large part of his success, that's not to say that his work is without tenderness and complexity.

He earned the title of U.S.

Poet Laureate in 2001, an honor which he held for two years.

And as his popularity continued to grow, his passion for the simple act of writing remained constant.

Is there a.

Process that you use when you're writing a poem?

Is there anything typical too?

Is there anything typical about the way that you construct your poetry?

Well, I started in the beginning.

Mm hmm.

And it's like Alice in Wonderland.

When I come to the end, I stop.

I mean, the poems are written and whatever I'm saying, I really don't know if this is the way everybody does it or nobody does it, but I don't.

So in the original, it is this is an opening.

Listen, the whole notion I mean, most of my poems are not the kind of watercolor type poetry where, you know, you get the sense that it's sort of an emotional feel that you're drifting in.

My poems are much more clearer, much clearer than that.

They tend to have a beginning, middle and end, or that tend to go off here.

And then there's a point at which it shifts over here, and then there's a shift point to the end so you can follow them.

You know, and I'm I'm not saying that what they're about is completely simple or easily comprehensible, but the way they come, the way they go is, you know, the way that the way they get from the beginning to the ending, I think is is perfectly clear.

You know, I clean as I go along.

I don't make a big mess and come back.

I try to test every every line, every sentence for to see if it'll hold up.

And and I don't go forward until I feel that the sentences are in the lines of some solidity to them.

When you write your poetry, are you handwriting or typing?

Oh, always.

Handwriting.

Always.

Yeah, always.

So that you can see your edits or y yeah.

So you can just see the mess you've made and scratching out and you might have, you might write one word and you think maybe another word would be better and you write that word in the margins.

So then you can, you can see the the through the thought process or the compositional frenzy of experience once they get it on a word on a screen.

I know, of course, that there is a certain glibness to editing on a screen which is suitable for prose.

I mean, you can, you know, delete the stanza, copy paste.

It's all this fluidity.

But when I see a poem up on the screen, it looks done.

It looks like I can't do anything with it now.

So what comes first, the poem or the title?

Oh, almost always the poem.

Yeah, almost always the poem.

Titling is very tricky because, well, there's at least one mistake that could be made in titling.

I consider it a mistake, and that is that the poet has finished the poems and now it's time for the title and I have to put the hat on the poem.

The poet has all this information about the poem.

The poets, you know, might have been maybe have written 15 drafts, and maybe it's taken them, I don't know, weeks, two or three weeks.

He's been working on this poem.

He has all this information that the reader doesn't know that he's privy to.

If if you construct a title based on that, all that information you have, it's very unfair to the reader because the reader is suddenly playing catch up.

If you, you know, if the title is something like the Redemption of the Past.

Well, I mean, please.

I mean, can we just start with the little you know, it's just too much too soon for me.

So I like to write a title that does not include anything.

I know about the poem that the reader who doesn't know anything about the poem would have to know.

So I like titles for a simple title, like Snow Monday, stuff like that.

And then I like really long titles, like I Chopped Some Parsley while listening to Art Blakey's version of Three By Blind Mice, or A. James writes on reading that The Last Remaining Whorehouse in Wheeling, West Virginia, is about to be condemned or something like that.

So then you get a lot of that expository stuff up in the title.

Then you don't need to waste the first stanza with all this sort of like cinematic prose things.

You know, that's scene setting is for people who write prose.

Discussing the ins and outs of the writing process comes pretty naturally to Billy.

After all, he's had a career as a teacher almost as long as he's had a career as a poet.

And that love for teaching was made evident during his time as poet laureate when he instituted the Poetry 180 program designed for high school students.

The campaign offered 180 poems, one for each day of the school year in an initiative to hone our youth love for poetry by supplying them with modern works that they might not normally have access to.

And Collins seems to have a remarkable effect on students, no doubt in part due to his gift for reading and keeping audiences enthralled and laughing.

Do you enjoy reading your poems out loud?

Yes, I do.

I mean, it's, you know, writing poetry is is a very private experience.

And probably one of the main reasons I was attracted to it was just that that it's a deeply sequestered activity.

You're very much it's sort of you and the dictionary and all the problems that are written before you for a company.

So you're not really alone, but.

And then to I've never written a poem thinking about a lectern or an auditorium at all.

When I write, I write.

It's very quiet, very private communication between me and some person sitting somewhere and in a quiet place.

And then suddenly there are a whole bunch of people who want to hear them.

And no, I do.

I it's it's fun.

I mean, you get you get the attention that you don't get when you're writing.

I mean, no one when you're writing a poem at the end of it, no one applauds.

I mean, it's just the dog rolls over or whatever.

And so so there's that.

There's that drama to it and satisfaction.

Is there something about poetry, though, that that is meant to be read aloud that is meant to be heard?

I know.

You know, even in high school, you know, between Yeats and Keats and Shakespeare, you know, everything was about we must memorize and read aloud and the nature, you know, no one did that to us with prose.

It was always about poetry.

Well, it's true.

I mean, you can't build mainly you can't memorize prose.

I mean, it's very difficult.

You could memorize the Gettysburg Address or a few things like that, but poetry is eminently memorize of all.

And that's the beauty of the beauty of poetry is it's totally portable.

You can take it in your head.

It doesn't require a building.

It doesn't require an instrument or an easel, which is one reason that poetry is so deeply connected with Ireland.

It's not because of the romantic idea that the Irish of are blessed with the gift of gab or something.

That's that's a falsehood, a romantic falsehood.

The reality is that as a country that was oppressed for 600 years, they didn't have anything.

They didn't have a concert hall.

You know, no one had a cello.

You had nothing.

But they can't take poetry from you because you can carry it in your head.

And story, too.

I've always associated poetry with Ireland because my English teacher in high school was Irish.

I never knew there more that we would repeat after her at all about sounding Southern Irish.

You know, when I have fears that may cease to be because of him.

Well, he she or he she she speaks to me.

Spare you the historical horrors of of Irish occupation.

Well, if we ever wanted to get out of class, we did how wonderful Margaret Thatcher was.

And everything was said and done.

Memorization is thought of as a very old fashioned way to teach poetry.

But I always have my students memorize something.

And my mother, who died when she was 97, she was born in 1901 in rural Canada.

And so she would have been in school, you know, in 1910, 1914, around in there.

And memorization was quite a respectable way to convey poetry.

And as a result, right up to her eighties and nineties, she could recite tons of poetry that she memorized as a schoolgirl, not as an adult.

So early memorization as very good.

So you suddenly have these internal companions that are good for if you have an MRI or you have to wait for a bus for a long time, or if you're in jail, you have when I have fears that I may cease to be in a big if you company, you're not alone.

Of course, we wouldn't let the interview end without hearing Billy read a poem, but I couldn't miss the opportunity to first hear how it came to be.

Will you share.

The story behind the poem Litany.

Of.

Well, that was I hate the word inspired because it seems to describe more than what actually happens.

But the poem was started.

I literally was reading a I forgot what magazine, literary magazine.

I came across a poem by a Belgian.

Well, I'd never heard of his name was in his job creaky on or something.

And he had written a poem which relied on these conventional love conventions of flattering the Beloved by comparing her to him to everything in nature.

I was going to say everything under the sun, including the sun itself.

And I just had I had it was some tipping point.

I had it was like the the last straw.

I just thought, this has been going on since Petrarch or before.

You know, your eyes are like stars and your skin is like this and all that.

And I thought, this is just ripe to be made fun of.

So and then I looked in the back of the and the contributors notes, and all it said was Jacques Cricceone lives in Belgium.

And I thought, Well, that's far enough away so that he is not going to hit me.

Probably never hear about this.

Maybe he has since then.

But so I just wrote a poem that that made fun of comparing women to, to objects and natural.

And then I did something that forgives the comparison, and I just did something that that Shakespeare does commonly is that the poem begins by being about the beloved and ends up being about Shakespeare litany.

You are the bread in the knife, the crystal goblet and the wine.

You are the dew on the morning grass and the burning wheel of the sun.

You are the white apron of the baker and the marsh birds.

Suddenly in flight, however you are not the wind in the orchard, the plums on the counter or the house of cards.

And you are certainly not the pine scented air.

There is no way you are the Pine scented air.

It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge, maybe even the pigeon on the general's head, but you are not even close to being the field of corn flowers at dusk.

And a quick look in the mirror will show that you are neither the boots in the corner nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.

It might interest you to know, speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world that I am the sound of rain on the roof.

I also happened to be the shooting star, the evening paper blowing down an alley and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.

I am also the moon in the trees and the blind woman's teacup.

But don't worry, I am not the bread in the knife.

You are still the bread in the knife.

You will always be the bread in the knife, not to mention the crystal goblet.

And somehow the wine.