Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

I first encountered Billy Collins three years ago, on a warm summers day in New York. It was lunchtime, and a small crowd of Wall Street types had gathered along the esplanade by the East River. Here, in the heart of the city’s financial district, they were listening to a man reciting poetry through a portable loudspeaker. One particularly striking poem, I remember, was about minor American paintings hung in a museum:

I like the calm rustic ones: a surface of a lake,
the low bough of an oak like a long arm,
a blue smudge of distant hills,
anything with cows, especially if they are standing
in a stream, their large, vacuous faces
staring into the warm, nineteenth century afternoon.
And if one has lowered her head to drink
and the painter has indicated with flecks of white
the water pouring down from the animal’s mouth,
then the day, I feel, has achieved a modest crest.

The poet, Billy Collins, is a 57-year-old professor of English at the City University of New York, and his fame as a poet has achieved more than a modest crest: Collins is one of America’s favorite living poets. He has published six collections of verse, including the recent Picnic, Lightning, which sold 17,000 copies in a year - an impressive tally for a book of poems. A new book, Study In Orange And White, comes out in mid-2000. And for British audiences, Picador will publish next year a book of selected verse. Its title - Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes - is typical Collins:

The complexity of women’s undergarments
in nineteenth-century America
is not to be waved off,
and I proceeded like a polar explorer
through clips, clasps, and moorings,
catches, straps, and whalebone stays,
sailing toward the iceberg of her nakedness.

Later, I wrote in a notebook
it was like riding a swan into the night,
but, of course, I cannot tell you everything -
the way she closed her eyes to the orchard,
how her hair tumbled free of its pins,
how there were sudden dashes whenever we spoke.

Billy Collins is no Maya Angelou, that deep-voiced priestess to the rich and politically connected. Nor is he shaggy and erudite, like the accomplished American, Robert Pinsky. He’s just Billy - not even William - who favors what he describes as a “casual, blue-jeans kinda style.”

“I think a lot of readers are frustrated with the obscurity and self indulgence of most poetry,” says Collins, during a recent conversation. “I try very assiduously to court the reader and engage him. I am interested more in a public following than a critical one.”

Collins does like being sort-of-famous, he says. He enjoys the threedozen or so public readings he does each year. And barring the ‘McPoems’ he encounters among undergraduates - memory-driven recitations about parents, childhood and romantic separation - he enjoys teaching.

What rescues his own work from being dull or sentimental is the carefully crafted voice, at once kooky and serious. Here are the first verses of I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey’s Version of ‘Three Blind Mice’:

And I start wondering how they came to be blind.
If it was congenital, they could be brothers and sisters,
and I think of the poor mother
brooding over her sightless young triplets.

Or was it a common accident, all three caught
in a searing explosion, a firework perhaps?
If not,
if each came to his or her blindness separately,

how did they ever manage to find one another?
Would it not be difficult for a blind mouse
to locate even one fellow mouse with vision
let alone two other blind mice?

And how, in their tiny darkness,
could they possibly have run after a farmer’s wife
or anyone else’s wife for that matter?
Not to mention why.

Just so she could cut off their tails
with a carving knife, is the cynic’s answer,
but the thought of them without eyes
and now without tails to trail through the moist grass

or slip around the corner of a baseboard
has the cynic who always lounges within me
up off his couch and at the window
trying to hide the rising softness that he feels.

This bemusement gives Collins the freedom to tackle unconventional subjects, which, in turn, lets him infuse each poem with a distinct mood, if not tremendous variety. In one of his favorite poems, Osso Bucco, he muses on suburban pleasures in modern America:

I am swaying now in the hour after dinner,
a citizen tilted back on his chair,
a creature with a full stomach -
something you don’t hear much about in poetry,
that sanctuary of hunger and deprivation.
You know: the driving rain, the boots by the door,
small birds searching for berries in winter.

“This was a very difficult poem, but I’m fond of it,” he says. “Serious art takes misery as a given, but I wanted to write a poem about contentment. So I came up with this metaphor - osso bucco.”

But, at times, Collins’ charm gets repetitive, the easygoing lilt becomes slightly self-parodying:

I was here before, a long time ago,
and now I am here again
is an observation that occurs in poetry
as frequently as rain occurs in life.

He likes jazz, too. Nothing wrong with that. Even the talented sourpuss, Philip Larkin, was an admirer. But jazz, above all, is beautiful because it’s un-obvious, multilayered, tricky. Most Collins’ poems about jazz are not:

I cannot help noticing how this slow Monk solo
Seems to go somehow
With the snow
That is coming down this morning.

Collins says he usually finishes a poem in one sitting, though he’ll often go back and tinker. Inspiration crops up in unlikely places. When a friend once remarked that snow had a subversive quality because it shut things down, it gave Collins the perfect opening for a poem: “Today we had a revolution of snow.”

Collins’ influences range from Ferlinghetti and cummings to Stevens, Hart Crane and Ginsberg, and his teenage jottings mimicked these writers’ erudition and complex verse. “I thought to be a poet you had to speak in code. It was like verbal knitting.”

It never got him anywhere, though. “I was writing six-line poems that would shut down or screech to a clever ending,” he complains. Then he picked up a Keatsian trick: How to prolong a poem by giving it various “breaths” and, thereby, suspending its meditative quality. At the end of Osso Bucco, for instance, Collins’ wife is on the phone, while he continues to savor the ‘lion of contentment’ that has ‘placed a warm, heavy paw’ on his chest. The poem ends with these wonderful lines:

In a while, one of us will go up to bed
and the other one will follow.
Then we will slip below the surface of the night
into miles of water, drifting down and down
to the dark, soundless bottom
until the weight of dreams pulls us lower still,
below the shale and layered rock,
beneath the strata of hunger and pleasure,
into the broken bones of the earth itself,
into the marrow of the only place we know.

“In a poem, I want the reader to have the sensation that they’ve traveled,” says Collins. “At the end I want them to know they’ve been taken on an imaginative journey. In Osso Bucco, we start in the confines of the kitchen and end up at the center of the earth. That’s a good example of travel.”

And what does a good poem give Billy Collins? “My poetry is something to do with my inner life. It’s an activity. It doesn’t give me an understanding, but it does give me an imaginative thrill. Nabokov said: ‘Life is beautiful, and we’re dying.’ Every poem is about this.”