Scanning the Bookshelf

Let's be frank: Popular poets who also attracted critical acclaim were a rarity in the 20th century. They still are. Robert Frost had both a large audience and approval from critics and scholars. Allen Ginsberg ultimately did too, though they had divergent audiences.

Billy Collins has a big following now, and critics have embraced him too. His new collection, “Ballistics,” has a first printing of 40,000, which compares more accurately to the quantity for a well-known novelist rather than a poet.

But ask him about that popularity and he says, perhaps self-deprecatingly, “I never could understand the basis for it. I still can't.”

Collins, now 67, is just as unpretentious in conversation as he is in his poetry.

He had been writing poems since high school, but his first collection wasn't published until Collins was in his 40s.

“I didn't really have any hopes for my poetry,” he says.

He grew up in New York City, going to Catholic schools and to College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., for his bachelor's degree. Then, he went West, obtained an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Riverside, and wrote a doctoral dissertation on the great English romantic writers William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Collins has taught since the late 1960s at the Lehman College of the City University of New York and is now a Distinguished Professor of English there. He's also taught at Sarah Lawrence College in New York and is currently a part-time writer-in-residence at Rollins College in Florida.

“As one friend described it, I used to be a professor who happened to write poetry and now I'm a poet who happens to be a professor.”

In a 2005 interview, he poked fun at himself for being a “third-rate Wallace Stevens” in his earlier years. It's hard to imagine him writing the dense, allusive poetry this description conjured up, given his trademark conversational style. But Collins' evolution also seems to have made him impatient with the idea that people think successful poetry is somehow trying to express something that could be said more clearly in another form.

He writes in “The Effort,” a poem from his new book: “Would anyone care to join me / in flicking a few pebbles in the direction / of teachers who are fond of asking the question: 'What is the poet trying to say?' / as if Thomas Hardy and Emily Dickinson / had struggled but ultimately failed in their efforts …”

His ambition is to succeed in saying what you think he's saying, which is, often as not, quite funny.

Humor is clearly one source of his success.

Who isn't going to finish reading a poem — “Le Chien” — that begins “I remember late one night in Paris / speaking at length to a dog in English / about the future of American culture.”

In “the Brooklyn Museum of Art,” from an earlier collection, he writes about being in front of an American landscape painting he likes and suddenly he's inside the picture — literally — and the whole scenario seems perfectly sensible. He imagines himself writing a history of the world by evoking places and their weather going all the way back to Eden (in “The History of Weather”).

“I think there's a chattiness to my poetry. I usually begin with a thought of some kind, some notion of the past and the present. And I like to feel like I'm holding the hand of the reader in some way.”

He does enjoy an audience.

“I think I'm a sociable guy.”

Surely his willingness to be an ambassador for poetry is some evidence of that sociability. After serving his two-year stint as poet laureate of the United States, he was also poet laureate of the state of New York from 2004 to 2006.

Still, he sounds a little relieved not to be moving as frequently, “going from podium to podium.”

Collins was U.S. poet laureate at an auspicious time in recent history, of course. He read a poem, “The Names,” before a joint session of Congress in 2002, in remembrance of the victims of 9/11.

But his most memorable moment as poet laureate happened at a high school.

“After reading, a boy, about 16, came up and asked me how many people in the government had to die before I became president. It was sort of flattering that he thought a poet was that important, but I had to tell him I wasn't in the line of succession.”

“Ballistics” is Collins' eighth collection. He still enjoys teaching, while acknowledging there's a contradiction between the study of literature and the creation of it.

“I think of poetry as coming from the unfurnished side of the brain while talking about it takes you to part of the brain that is already furnished.”

Apparently, there is still plenty of unfilled space in that portion of Collins' brain. Or, you might say, he keeps clearing space for more poems.

Changing metaphors, he follows the same line of thought about his poems on the last page of “Ballistics”: “So off you go, little infants of the brain. / with a wave and some bits of fatherly advice / stay out as late as you like, / don't bother to call or write, / and talk to as many strangers as you can.”

To find out more about Robert L. Pincus and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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