billy collins essay on poetry

Poems & Poets

Billy Collins

Dubbed “the most popular poet in America” by Bruce Weber in the New York Times, Billy Collins is famous for conversational, witty poems that welcome readers with humor but often slip into quirky, tender, or profound observation on the everyday, reading and writing, and poetry itself. Collins was born in 1941 in New York City. He earned a BA from the College of the Holy Cross, and both an MA and PhD from the University of California-Riverside. In 1975 he cofounded the Mid-Atlantic Review with Michael Shannon. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts and has taught at Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence, and Lehman College, City University of New York, where he is a Distinguished Professor. He is also Senior Distinguished Fellow of the Winter Park Institute in Florida, and a faculty member at the State University of New York-Stonybrook.

Collins’s level of fame is almost unprecedented in the world of contemporary poetry: his readings regularly sell out, and he received a six-figure advance when he moved publishers in the late 1990s. He served two terms as the US poet laureate, from 2001-2003, was New York State poet laureate from 2004-2006, and is a regular guest on National Public Radio programs. In 2002, as US poet laureate, Collins was asked to write a poem commemorating the first anniversary of the fall of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center on September 11. The reading was in front of a joint session of Congress held outside of Washington, DC.

Though Collins published throughout the 1980s, it was his fourth book, Questions about Angels (1991), that propelled him into the literary spotlight. The collection was selected by poet Ed Hirsch for the 1990 National Poetry Series. Collins’s subsequent work has been regularly lauded for its ability to connect with readers. Discussing Picnic, Lightning (1998) and its predecessor, The Art of Drowning (1995) , John Taylor noted that Collins’s skillful, smooth style and inventive subject matter “helps us feel the mystery of being alive.” Taylor added: “Rarely has anyone written poems that appear so transparent on the surface yet become so ambiguous, thought-provoking, or simply wise once the reader has peered into the depths.”

Taking off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes (2000) was the first Collins collection published outside the US. It selected work from his previous four books and was met with great acclaim in the UK. Poet and critic Michael Donaghy called Collins a “rare amalgam of accessibility and intelligence,” and A.L. Kennedy described the volume as containing “great verse, moving, intelligent and darkly funny.” Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems (2001), the US version of Collins’s selected, had a tumultuous journey to print . The story, which garnered a front-page slot in the New York Times, originally cast Collins’s first publishers, the University of Pittsburgh Press, in an unfair light, accusing them of refusing to grant rights for poems requested by Random House for inclusion in Sailing Alone Around the Room. However, it later emerged that Random House had begun to produce the book without first securing rights from Pitt Poetry Press, a highly unusual move for a major publishing house to make. Dennis Loy Johnson reported on the controversy for Salon , noting that “ultimately it was Random House, not Pitt, that chose to delay the publication of Collins’s selected volume.” The battle between Random House and the University of Pittsburgh Press was public and uncharacteristic of the world of poetry publishing. When Sailing Alone Around the Room was finally published, in 2001, it was met with enthusiastic reviews and brisk sales.

Collins’s next books Nine Horses: Poems (2002), The Trouble with Poetry (2005), Ballistics (2008), Horoscopes for the Dead (2011), Aimless Love (2013), and The Rain in Portugal (2016) have continued to offer poems that mix humor with insight. Reviewing Nine Horses for the New York Times, Mary Jo Salter commented that Collins’s “originality derives, it seems, from the marriage of a loopy, occasionally surreal imagination … to an ordinary life observed in just a few ordinary words.” She added that “one appeal of the typical Collins poem is that it’s less able to help you memorize it than to help you to remember, for a little while anyway, your own life.” But Collins’s emphasis on writing—and writing “ordinary life” at that—can, for some critics, make his poetry seem pedestrian or one-note. However, many readers find Collins a source of warmth, wit, and surprisingly sure technique, and reviewers have consistently noted how Collins’s poems manifest a literal concern for their readers. John Deming in Cold Front Mag has discussed Collins’s concern for those reading his poems because “the transmission of poem to head takes place always elsewhere and in silence, in the mysterious space where poems live…Collins lets us access this place with alarming graciousness, and the openness of his voice probably helps account for his popularity.”

Poet-critic Richard Howard has said of Collins: “He has a remarkably American voice…that one recognizes immediately as being of the moment and yet has real validity besides, reaching very far into what verse can do.” Collins has described himself as “reader conscious”: “I have one reader in mind, someone who is in the room with me, and who I’m talking to, and I want to make sure I don’t talk too fast, or too glibly. Usually I try to create a hospitable tone at the beginning of a poem. Stepping from the title to the first lines is like stepping into a canoe. A lot of things can go wrong.” Collins further related: “I think my work has to do with a sense that we are attempting, all the time, to create a logical, rational path through the day. To the left and right there are an amazing set of distractions that we usually can’t afford to follow. But the poet is willing to stop anywhere.”

North America
U.S., Mid-Atlantic

Billy Collins’s 6 Pleasures Of Poetry

Do you want to capture your reader’s attention? In this post, we explain how Billy Collins’s 6 pleasures of poetry will help you become a better writer in any genre .

[Billy Collins is an American poet who was born 22 March 1941 .]

Bold claim incoming: Above all, reading literature ought to be pleasurable , even—dare I say it—fun.

Now, some readers might bristle and kick at this statement. No! — foremost of all literature must challenge, inform, and enrich!

And, yes, while these may be worthy goals in reading and writing literature, the idea that a work ought to be pleasurable first is purely pragmatic.

Two things drive human behaviour: the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain.

So, if we want to urge readers to continue reading our work, we must give them a solid reason to do so first. Reading that work must be pleasant, so pleasant, and engaging, in fact, that all other activities seem almost painful by comparison.

And if reading work is a chore, dull, even miserable? Well, it doesn’t matter how challenging, informative, or enriching it might be—the promise of such things won’t be enough to motivate the reader to press on, let alone finish reading.

A quick question: Have you gotten to a point in your growth as a writer where your work is technically and mechanically correct, but still a bit dull and unengaging?

It’s tempting to tell yourself these are signs that your work is serious and therefore important. But this is an age-old copout. The truth is it’s time to figure out some strategies to make your work more pleasurable, and thus, engaging.

Well, Billy Collins has theorised about the distinct pleasures literature (and poetry in particular) potentially provides us as readers. ( Billy Collins was poet laureate of New York and then the United States.) And, in his essay Poetry, Pleasure, and the Hedonist Reader , and his Masterclass, he enumerates them. I encourage you to check out these primary sources at some point, but I’ve tried to cover the best bits in this article.

Suggested reading: Billy Collins’s 6 Elements Of A Poem

1. The Pleasure Of Dance

Essentially, the pleasure of dance is the rhythm of your writing, which is largely governed by sentence length and punctuation . Do you want to create a sense of building tension, of creating suspense with—not just the way your work’s content unfolds—but the flow of your prose itself? Great! Try writing longer compound and complex sentences to lend your work moments of breathlessness. Want to create emphasis instead? To make a point? Use shorter sentences. No commas . No clauses. Whatever you do, use a variety of sentence lengths, types, and structures.

2. The Pleasure Of Sound

Let’s face it; some words are just fun to say.

Words like sibilant, mellifluous, and… kerfuffle .

Collins encourages writers to use words that ‘mean more and sound better’. So, don’t just search for the word that has the precise denotative meaning you looking for, but the right connotation and sound as well.

Because, remember, as Collins says: ‘there is no such thing as a synonym.’

3. The Pleasure Of Travel

Collins suggests great writing ought to transform and transport us. A story, poem, or essay ought to take us to different worlds (and worlds of experience). Whether the piece takes us to a real rarefied and exotic location, or an imaginative dreamscape—it doesn’t matter. Readers just want to be taken from the familiar to the unfamiliar, from Kansas to Oz.

4. The Pleasure Of Metaphoric Connection

This pleasure is all about the surprise of new perspectives—the pleasure of a new synapse forming a connection between two unlikely subjects. Collins calls this moving from the ‘provisional to the discovered subject’; a foundational technique in his work. Probably the most famous example from his oeuvre is his poem The Lanyard which tracks his mind wandering from the word lanyard to an experience making a lanyard as a child, to a revelation about motherhood.

5. The Pleasure Of Meaning

This refers to when a work’s emotional effect crystallises into a significance you can articulate—an epiphany of emotional and intellectual significance. This is often whatever ultimate insight the writer has stumbled across while writing that they share with the reader (whether subtly or explicitly). Collins says the key to making this epiphany feel natural is to never go into the composition process with a thesis statement or moral in mind. Otherwise, he warns the piece will come across as cloying and didactic. However, if you are genuinely going on a journey of discovery and welcome readers to tag along—they are much more likely to accept (or at least be intrigued by) whatever insight you may happen upon.

6. The Pleasure Of Companionship

This, to Collins, is the most precious aspect of literature. A work of literature becomes the reader’s companion when they internalise it and carry it with them. This can happen a number of ways: through memorising a poem or passage of a story or essay or even imbibing whatever emotional and/or intellectual epiphany it gave you. Whatever the case may be, when you really internalise a work, anytime you think of it you get to relive the profound experience of whatever it evokes in you.

The Final Word

And there you have it: Collins’s 6 Pleasures Of Poetry!

Next time your writing or revising, go back through your work, not as a writer, but with a reader’s eye. How many of the above pleasures do you find in your work? Is there a passage you could revise or add to so that it could evoke any of the pleasures that might be missing?

Finally, consider Collins’ simple but effective mantra for his own work: ‘Don’t forget the reader.’

If you enjoyed this, read: Billy Collins’s 6 Elements Of A Poem

Source for photograph: Marcelo Noah, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Billy_Collins_2007_by_Marcelo_Noah.jpg

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Billy Collins

Billy Collins was born in New York, New York, on March 22, 1941. He is the author of several books of poetry, including Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems (Random House, 2013), Horoscopes for the Dead: Poems (Random House, 2012); Ballistics: Poems (Random House, 2008); She Was Just Seventeen (Modern Haiku Press, 2006); The Trouble with Poetry: And Other Poems (Random House, 2005); Nine Horses (Pan Macmillan, 2002); Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems (Random House, 2001); Picnic, Lightning (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998); The Art of Drowning (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), which was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize ; Questions About Angels (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991), which was selected by Edward Hirsch for the National Poetry Series; The Apple That Astonished Paris (University of Arkansas Press, 1988); Video Poems (Applezaba Press, 1979); and Pokerface (Kenmore Press, 1977).

A recording of Collins reading thirty-three of his poems, The Best Cigarette , was released in 1997. Collins’s poetry has appeared in anthologies, textbooks, and a variety of periodicals, including Poetry , American Poetry Review , American Scholar , Harper’s , The Paris Review , and The New Yorker . His work has also been featured in the Pushcart Prize anthology and has been chosen several times for the annual Best American Poetry series. Collins has edited Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry (Random House, 2003), an anthology of contemporary poems for use in schools, and was a guest editor for the 2006 edition of The Best American Poetry.

About Collins, the poet Stephen Dunn has said,

We seem to always know where we are in a Billy Collins poem, but not necessarily where he is going. I love to arrive with him at his arrivals. He doesn’t hide things from us, as I think lesser poets do. He allows us to overhear, clearly, what he himself has discovered.

Collins served as U.S. poet laureate from 2001 to 2003, and as the New York State poet laureate from 2004 to 2006. His other honors and awards include the Mark Twain Prize for Humor in Poetry, as well as fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 1992, he was chosen by the New York Public Library to serve as “Literary Lion.” He has conducted summer poetry workshops in Ireland at University College Galway, and taught at Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, and Lehman College, City University of New York. He lives in Somers, New York.

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On Turning Ten Summary & Analysis by Billy Collins

Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis
Poetic Devices
Vocabulary & References
Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme
Line-by-Line Explanations

"On Turning Ten" was first published in the American poet Billy Collins's 1995 collection The Art of Drowning . One of the most popular contemporary U.S. poets, Collins is known for his humorous and conversational poems. This poem parodies a long tradition of "birthday poems," in which older poets reflect, often quite depressingly and with quite a bit of self-absorption, on their encroaching mortality. Here, the speaker is a child facing the prospect of turning 10 with horror and dread. Wistfully reminiscing about his life up until this point, the speaker contrasts the imagination and sense of invulnerability of early childhood with the painful loss of innocence that he must face in growing up.

Read the full text of “On Turning Ten”

LitCharts

The Full Text of “On Turning Ten”

“on turning ten” summary, “on turning ten” themes.

Growing Up and the Loss of Innocence

Memory and Nostalgia

Line-by-line explanation & analysis of “on turning ten”.

The whole idea ... ... in bad light--

a kind of ... ... of the soul.

You tell me ... ... remember every digit.

Lines 13-16

At four I ... ... nine a prince.

Lines 17-20

But now I ... ... my tree house,

Lines 21-23

and my bicycle ... ... out of it.

Lines 24-27

This is the ... ... first big number.

Lines 28-32

It seems only ... ... knees. I bleed.

“On Turning Ten” Symbols

Lines 18-19: “watching the late afternoon light. / Back then it never fell so solemnly”
Lines 28-30: “I used to believe / there was nothing under my skin but light. / If you cut me I could shine.”

Childhood Toys

Lines 19-20: “Back then it never fell so solemnly / against the side of my tree house,”
Lines 21-23: “and my bicycle never leaned against the garage / as it does today, / all the dark blue speed drained out of it.”

Line 17: “But now I am mostly at the window”

“On Turning Ten” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

Alliteration.

Line 2: “something”
Line 3: “something,” “stomach”
Line 5: “measles,” “spirit”
Line 6: “mumps,” “psyche”
Line 7: “soul”
Line 8: “be,” “back”
Line 9: “but,” “because”
Line 10: “being”
Line 11: “beautiful”
Line 12: “But,” “bed”
Line 14: “make myself”
Line 15: “certain”
Line 16: “seven,” “soldier”
Lines 17-18: “window / watching”
Line 18: “late,” “light”
Line 19: “so solemnly”
Line 20: “side”
Line 24: “sadness,” “say”
Line 26: “time to,” “to”
Line 27: “time,” “ to ,” “turn”
Line 30: “cut,” “could”
Line 31: “sidewalks”
Line 32: “skin”
Line 5: “a”
Line 6: “a”
Line 7: “a”
Line 13: “At”
Line 16: “At,” “at”
Line 26: “It is time to”
Line 27: “time to”
Line 2: “coming ”
Lines 2-3: “something, / something”
Line 3: “stomach”
Line 7: “disfiguring chicken”
Line 11: “beautiful,” “introduced,” “two”
Line 12: “I,” “lie,” “my,” “bed,” “remember every”
Line 14: “invisible”
Line 15: “drinking,” “milk”
Line 20: “side,” “my”
Line 24: “This is,” “beginning”
Line 25: “through,” “universe”
Line 26: “time,” “bye,” “my”
Line 27: “turn,” “first”
Line 28: “believe”
Line 29: “nothing under,” “but”
Line 30: “cut”
Line 31: “fall upon,” “sidewalks,” “life”
Line 32: “I,” “my,” “knees,” “I,” “bleed”
Line 1: “makes”
Line 2: “like I'm coming,” “something”
Line 3: “something worse,” “stomach ache”
Line 4: “headaches”
Line 7: “disfiguring chicken pox,” “soul”
Line 10: “perfect simplicity,” “being”
Line 11: “beautiful,” “complexity,” “introduced,” “two”
Line 14: “could make myself invisible”
Line 15: “drinking,” “glass,” “milk,” “certain”
Line 16: “seven,” “soldier,” “nine,” “prince”
Line 17: “window”
Line 18: “watching,” “late afternoon light”
Line 19: “fell so solemnly”
Line 20: “against,” “side,” “house”
Line 21: “bicycle,” “against”
Line 22: “does today”
Line 23: “dark,” “speed drained”
Line 24: “This,” “sadness,” “say,” “myself”
Line 25: “universe,” “sneakers”
Line 26: “time to”
Line 27: “time to turn,” “first”
Line 32: “skin,” “knees”
Lines 1-2: “The whole idea of it makes me feel / like I'm coming down with something,”
Lines 3-4: “ache / or”
Lines 9-10: “forgotten / the”
Lines 10-11: “one / and”
Lines 14-15: “invisible / by”
Lines 19-20: “solemnly / against”
Lines 21-22: “garage / as”
Lines 28-29: “believe / there”
Lines 8-11: “You tell me it is too early to be looking back, / but that is because you have forgotten / the perfect simplicity of being one / and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.”
Lines 13-16: “At four I was an Arabian wizard. / I could make myself invisible / by drinking a glass of milk a certain way. / At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.”
Lines 24-25: “This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself, / as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.”
Lines 5-7: “a kind of measles of the spirit, / a mumps of the psyche, / a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.”
Lines 31-32: “But now when I fall upon / , / I skin my knees. I bleed.”
Line 31: “the sidewalks of life”

Personification

Lines 18-19: “ the late afternoon light. / Back then it never fell so solemnly”
Lines 21-23: “my bicycle never leaned against the garage / as it does today, / all the dark blue speed drained out of it.”
Lines 2-3: “something, / something ”
Lines 19-20: “never fell so solemnly / against”
Line 21: “never leaned against”

“On Turning Ten” Vocabulary

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

Chicken pox
(Location in poem: Line 5: “a kind of measles of the spirit,”)

Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “On Turning Ten”

Rhyme scheme, “on turning ten” speaker, “on turning ten” setting, literary and historical context of “on turning ten”, more “on turning ten” resources, external resources.

An Interview with Collins — Read this 2007 interview with Billy Collins, originally published in Guernica Magazine, where he discusses his poetic style and influences.

Billy Collins's Biography — A detailed biography of Collins's life and career as a poet.

A Reading of "On Turning Ten" — Hear Billy Collins read and talk about"On Turning Ten" at the 2009 National Writing Project Annual Meeting.

LitCharts on Other Poems by Billy Collins

Afternoon with Irish Cows

Introduction to Poetry

The Art of Drowning

The History Teacher

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Home — Essay Samples — Arts & Culture — Art History — Poem Analysis: “Schoolsville” by Billy Collins

Poem Analysis: "Schoolsville" by Billy Collins

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Published: Mar 20, 2024

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The Poems of Billy Collins

By billy collins, the poems of billy collins analysis.

These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own.

Written by people who wish to remain anonymous

Billy Collins is a poet of the quotidian. He avoids the common traps of elitism and intellectualism which often spoil good poetry by keeping himself humble and grounded in the present. To Collins, the complexity of poetry is best suited to the deceptive simplicity of daily life. He writes about what he sees, through the lens of impermanence.

In his more personal poems, Collins writes in a narrative persona about frustrations he feels. "Forgetfulness" is an example of one of his concerns. In this text Collins uses the frightening phenomenon of forgetting things to remind himself and readers that we people will someday, also be forgotten. The value of remembering is that it is only a temporary act. The memory is one of the most elusive of masters.

Collins invites readers into his daily life, even into his living room. "Litany" is a meditation upon the immediate. Each new object within sight is transformed into something valuable and nearly magical in Collin's esteem, just by their sheer familiarity and presence. "Fool Me Good" offers a more direct approach as Collins talks through his desire to be more present for himself and for others. He uses one single moment to make a decision with grand implications for his future.

In these and other poems, Collins offers himself up as a sacrificial lamb to his readers. He is the example of what being human is like. Investing in small moments and simple pleasures, he invites readers into an intentional lifestyle. Collins centers his writing on the present moment, as a defense against the steady and inevitably corrupting passage of time.

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The Poems of Billy Collins Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Poems of Billy Collins is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Study Guide for The Poems of Billy Collins

The Poems of Billy Collins study guide contains a biography of Billy Collins, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

About The Poems of Billy Collins
The Poems of Billy Collins Summary
Character List

Essays for The Poems of Billy Collins

The Poems of Billy Collins essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Poems of Billy Collins.

Fulfillment on the Susquehanna: Billy Collins's Message
Mocking the Sonnet
“Afternoon with Irish Cows”: When is a Cow More Than Just a Cow?

“Budapest” by Billy Collins: Explication Essay

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Introduction

First stanza, second stanza, third stanza, fourth stanza.

Billy Collins reflects on his writing process from the standpoint of his writing hand in the poem “Budapest.” He pictures it as an independent entity that is only concerned with moving across paper, as though in search of food. The hand only wants to keep existing and write more, representing the author’s creative drive. Meanwhile, the poet himself observes it and lets his imagination wander, creating places where he has never been. It is implied that the two trains of ideas are not connected, and the hand’s thoughts are not the same as those of the head. The poem illustrates Billy’s creative process as something that takes place automatically, even though he may be distracted.

The poem begins by establishing the analogy between the poet’s hand and an animal. The pen and the arm are included in the description, hence the mention of the snout and the clothing. The opening reads: “My pen moves along the page / like the snout of a strange animal / shaped like a human arm / and dressed in the sleeve of a loose green sweater.” The choice of dress implies that Billy is in a relaxed home setting, where he can set up a comfortable atmosphere before beginning work on his poetry. He lets his imagination wander, and the abstraction of seeing the pen as the snout of an animal is a possible result of this state.

The next line continues the analogy, expanding on it and moving further away from the subject of writing and poetry. The poet tries to find reasons why this odd animal would be sniffing around on his tabletop. The result is “I watch it sniffing the paper ceaselessly, / intent as any forager that has nothing / on its mind but the grubs and insects / that will allow it to live another day.” While these lines may be seen as a direct analogy to how animals must continuously search for food to survive in the wild, they also represent the poet’s creative drive. He is moved to write by instinct, and even if he is not thinking of anything, in particular, the pen records his state of mind.

The view is reinforced in the third stanza where the poet elaborates on the desires and goals of his arm. Indeed, it sees writing as its duty and wants to continue doing so in the future. As such, the lines read “It wants only to be here tomorrow, / dressed perhaps in the sleeve of a plaid shirt, / nose pressed against the page, / writing a few more dutiful lines.” Billy’s interests are separated: the head may dream and wander away from the topic, but his arm keeps demanding something to write down. It forces him to sit down every day and produce several lines, which may eventually find their way into a finished work of art.

The fourth, and final, stanza departs from the topic of the arm to establish that its aims are separate from those of the narrator. His imagination idly conjures up images, possibly as a source of inspiration, but more likely as a distraction. As such, the stanza reads, “while I gaze out the window / and imagine Budapest / or some other city / where I have never been.” Despite its inclusion in the poem’s title, Budapest is symbolic, a beautiful place with a rich history where Billy may want to go. However, the location does not necessarily have to be Budapest, and any beautiful scene would suffice. Billy is idly thinking of various ideas, with specifics having little relevance in setting his mood for writing.

The poem illustrates a stream of thought through Collins’ usual style of maintaining an erratic, non-rhyming form. The method creates the impression that the work was created while the poet was in the state of mind described within, less concerned with classical restrictions and more interested in transferring the thoughts to paper. Overall, the poem challenges the reader’s perceptions of how poetry and art, in general, are created. Collins does not have to concentrate and focus to begin writing, and instead, he is driven to do so by a passion he depicts as a detached impulse. Anything may serve as subject matter, even distracted musings about viewing one’s arm as an animal or thoughts about distant and unfamiliar places.

Billy Collins’ “Budapest” is a representation of his creative process and the forces involved in it. Instead of trying to focus and treat writing as work that has to be done, the poet allows himself to relax at home. He idly observes the paper, gazes out of the window, and thinks of whatever comes to the forefront of his mind. The writing happens independently, taking down his stream of thoughts and resulting incomplete works. This method likely lends Collins’ poems their signature erratic style, as he is more concerned with expression than trying to conform to stylistic norms. Ultimately, the poem supports viewing poetry as art, something that is fueled by inspiration and ideas more than hard work.

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IvyPanda. (2022, January 16). “Budapest” by Billy Collins: Explication. https://ivypanda.com/essays/budapest-by-billy-collins-explication/

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Billy collins , the art of poetry no. 83, issue 159, fall 2001.

Photo by Marcelo Noah, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

The big news, of course, is that Billy Collins has been appointed the new poet laureate by the Library of Congress, now the newest of a distinguished list that among others includes Robert Penn Warren, Joseph Brodsky, Robert Pinsky, and most recently, Stanley Kunitz.

Collins’s credentials, despite starting a career as a poet at the late age of forty, are impressive indeed. His various wonderfully named collections of poetry include Video Poems , Pokerface , Questions About Angels , The Art of Drowning , The Apple That Astonished Paris , Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes and Picnic, Lightning . Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems will be published this fall. His last three collections of poems have broken sales records for poetry. A well-known voice on National Public Radio, his public readings, perhaps better described as performances, are invariably put on before packed audiences.

His work is identified largely by its humor, which he speaks of as being “a door into the serious”—a comment echoed by John Updike’s sentiment: “Billy Collins writes lovely poems . . . limpid, gently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides.”

Collins lives in Somers, New York, a few miles from Katonah, which is about an hour’s ride on the commuter train from Grand Central Station. The Katonah station is unique in that it is set in the middle of town, so that one steps out of the train just a yard or so from the main street and the arts and crafts shops that line the far side. Collins’s home, a few miles away, is a renovated farmhouse that dates back to the 1860s. His wife, Diane, was away at work (she is an architect), but on hand was the family dog, Jeannine, a mixed breed collie named after a song popularized by Cannonball Adderly. Collins often breaks away from work to play Adderly-mode jazz on a piano in the living room.

Jeannine made it clear she wanted to be taken outside for exercise—which entailed running down a steep slope of lawn to retrieve a frazzled-looking frisbee, so indented with teeth marks as to resemble (as Collins put it) “the end of a worried writer’s pencil.” Jeannine finally seemed wearied enough to allow Collins to invite his guest back in the house for the interview.

In manner, Billy Collins is very much like what one would expect from reading his poems—quick to add a touch of humor to whatever he has to say, however serious the topic, but leaving no doubt that he is a very dedicated practitioner of his art. He teaches at Lehman College of the City University of New York; one envies his students for their chance to study comparative literature from such a source. And yet there is nothing of the formal Ivory Tower mien about Collins: he is, for example, a passionate golfer, and what time he can take off from the lecture circuit (he is in considerable demand, giving over forty readings a year) and his teaching duties at Lehman, he spends touring the historic golf courses of the country with his golfing friend and literary agent, Chris Calhoun. Perhaps his informal side is best reflected by his given name: he was christened William after his father, thus Willy for a while, and then Billy, which he has kept as his nom de plume as much in reaction to the pretentiousness of those writers who use their initials, or one initial and a given name, as in W. James Collins, or whatever.

The interview took place in the small comfortable study of his home—shelves of books, a pair of paintings, one an abstract by Dan Christensen, the other a 1930s subway scene by George Tooker.

BILLY COLLINS

I’d like to get something straightened out at the beginning: I write with a Uni-Ball Onyx Micropoint on nine-by-seven bound notebooks made by a Canadian company called Blueline. After I do a few drafts, I type up the poem on a Macintosh G3 and then send it out the door.

INTERVIEWER

Well, that’s certainly the kind of information we’re after, but can you tell us about the actual making of what you send out? Could you go through the genesis of a poem?

There’s a lot of waiting around until something happens. Some poets like David Lehman and William Stafford set out on these very willful programs to write a poem a day. They’re extending what Catullus said about “never a day without a line.” But most poets don’t write a poem a day. For me it’s a very sporadic activity. Until recently, I thought “occasional poetry” meant that you wrote only occasionally. So there’s a lot of waiting, and there’s a kind of vigilance involved. I think what gets a poem going is an initiating line. Sometimes a first line will occur, and it goes nowhere; but other times—and this, I think, is a sense you develop—I can tell that the line wants to continue. If it does, I can feel a sense of momentum—the poem finds a reason for continuing. The first line is the DNA of the poem; the rest of the poem is constructed out of that first line. A lot of it has to do with tone because tone is the key signature for the poem. The basis of trust for a reader used to be meter and end-rhyme. Now it’s tone that establishes the poet’s authority. The first few lines keep giving birth to more and more lines. Like most poets, I don’t know where I’m going. The pen is an instrument of discovery rather than just a recording implement. If you write a letter of resignation or something with an agenda, you’re simply using a pen to record what you have thought out. In a poem, the pen is more like a flashlight, a Geiger counter, or one of those metal detectors that people walk around beaches with. You’re trying to discover something that you don’t know exists, maybe something of value.

What inspires that first line? Is it something you see? Is it a passing thought, a line of someone else’s work?

There can be remote influences, but I think the line itself comes out of talking to yourself. It’s a matter of paying attention to the detritus that floats through your head all the time—little phrases that through your own self-talking, your talk monitor, sometimes pop up. Also, I try to start the poem conversationally. Poems, for me, begin as a social engagement. I want to establish a kind of sociability or even hospitality at the beginning of a poem. The title and the first few lines are a kind of welcome mat where I am inviting the reader inside. What I do with the reader later can be more complicated, but the beginning of the poem is a seductive technique for me, a way of making a basic engagement. Then I hope the poem gets a little bit ahead of me and the reader.

What about revision?

I try to write very fast. I don’t revise very much. I write the poem in one sitting. Just let it rip. It’s usually over in twenty to forty minutes. I’ll go back and tinker with a word or two, change a line for some metrical reason weeks later, but I try to get the whole thing just done. Most of these poems have a kind of rhetorical momentum. If the whole thing doesn’t come out at once, it doesn’t come out at all. I just pitch it.

You throw it out?

People say, Don’t throw anything away. This is standard workshop advice: Always save everything. You could use it in another poem. I don’t believe that. I say, Get rid of it. Because if it got into a later poem it would be Scotch-taped on. It would not be part of the organic, you know, chi, the spine that the poem has, the way it all should be one continuous movement.

What was that word you used?

Chi. I think they use that in feng shui. It’s the Chinese sense of energy that runs through things. Poems that lack that seem very mechanically put together, like a piece here and a part there. Because of the workshop and the M.F.A. phenomenon there’s much too much revision going on. Revision can grind a good impulse to dust. Of course, the distinction between revision and writing is kind of arbitrary because when I am writing I am obviously revising. And when I revise, I’m writing, aren’t I? I love William Matthews’s idea—he says that revision is not cleaning up after the party; revision is the party! That’s the fun of it, making it right, getting the best words in the best order.

Could you tell us about growing up, your family?

Both of my parents were born in 1901 and both lived into their nineties, the two of them just about straddling the century. My father was from a large Irish family from Lowell, Massachusetts, a mill town, incidentally Kerouac’s birthplace and the site of his first novel. I’ve never been to Lowell, but I was just invited by an editor of a magazine to go up there and write about my father and look at the Jack Kerouac place. I have a poem called “Lowell,” which is about the coincidence of my father being born in the same town as Jack Kerouac. You couldn’t find two more disparate characters. The end of the poem says something like, He would have told Neal Cassady to let him out at the next light.

My mother was born on a farm in Canada. She was the one who taught me to read by reading to me. I have a feeling that was one of the most important experiences of my life. At some point I could read by myself, but I didn’t want to be weaned away from that—I wanted to be read to. I have a secret theory that people who are addicted to reading are almost trying to recreate the joy, the comfortable joy of being read to as a child by a parent or a friendly uncle or an older sibling. Being read to as a child is one of the great experiences in life. Of course, I was always fascinated by the ability to read, and I’ll make this confession: before I could read, I pretended I could. My parents would have company over at our house, and I would get out a volume of Compton’s Encyclopedia , at the age of four or five, and sit there in an armchair and pretend to be reading—I would look very studious. I was the youngest phony in America. My parents would wink at their friends and, thinking that I had taken everybody in, I’d head off to bed.

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At his paternal grandmother’s home in Ibahernando, ca. 1977. All images courtesy of Javier Cercas.

Javier Cercas rose to literary stardom in Spain with Soldiers of Salamis (2001, translation 2003), a novel about a forgotten incident in the Spanish Civil War. The book is narrated by a struggling novelist and cultural reporter also named Javier Cercas, a grandchild of the war who becomes obsessed with piecing together the story of how Rafael Sánchez Mazas, a Fascist poet and intellectual and one of the founders of the Falange Española, escaped certain death by firing squad and was then spared again by an unknown Republican militiaman. Mario Vargas Llosa praised the book as a return to a “committed literature,” a work that was no less “novelistic, fanciful, and creative” for being about real events; it was an immediate bestseller in Spain and, to date, has sold nearly two million copies worldwide. But the book’s most meaningful impact in Spain was political: it drew attention to the civil war’s legacy, a topic that had been widely avoided by the Spanish people and government for decades, following the pact of forgetting that the left and right made when Franco’s dictatorship fell. Today, Soldiers is credited with indirectly providing the foundation for Spain’s Law of Historical Memory, which has led to the renaming of Spanish streets and squares, the exhumation of the mass graves of victims of Francoist repression, and the restoration of citizenship for the descendants of those who were exiled under the dictatorship.

Cercas is ambivalent about the “memory industry” that he helped foment, preferring to dwell in what he calls the blind spots of history, where the lines between heroism and betrayal, and authenticity and imposture, are less easily adjudicated. The first in a cycle of four novels that complicate Spain’s historical narrative, Soldiers of Salamis was followed by the nonfiction novel The Anatomy of a Moment (2009, 2011), a riveting portrait of the three members of Spanish Parliament who, during the attempted military coup of 1981 in which three hundred and fifty members of the Cortes were held hostage at gunpoint by a rebel faction of the Civil Guard, remained in their seats when asked to surrender; The Impostor (2014, 2017), about Enric Marco, a man from Barcelona who, for decades, falsely claimed he was a survivor of Flossenbürg concentration camp, and became a spokesperson for Spanish victims of Nazism; and Lord of All the Dead (2017, 2019), about Manuel Mena, Cercas’s own great-uncle, who died at nineteen serving in Franco’s army. More recently, he’s taken a foray into detective fiction, writing a series of novels called Terra Alta . Soon after we met, he finished a new book—“the most ambitious and craziest I’ve ever written,” he said—for which he spoke with cardinals and prefects in the Vatican and traveled with the Pope to Mongolia.

In his melding of reportage and archival research with novelistic techniques, Cercas is often compared to the French author Emmanuel Carrère. But where Carrère’s nonfiction narratives merge reporting on contemporary events with high-wire autobiography, Cercas’s books often feature invented narrators, whose creative blocks and marital crises serve to bolster the suspense of their moral examinations of the past. A private man, Cercas avoids literary society, but in recent years he has waged a public battle in his columns for El País against the independence movement of his Catalonian neighbors. He was born in 1962 in Ibahernando, a small village in Extremadura, but he moved to Girona, Catalonia, as a young child. He now lives between Barcelona, where he earned his Ph.D. in Spanish philology, and Verges, a small town in the north of Catalonia, with his wife, the Catalan former actor Mercè Mas.

We spoke this past spring, over the course of three days at his apartment in Barcelona. The living room was sparsely decorated but for a still life of a bowl of fruits painted by a childhood friend and a trove of literary awards haphazardly stashed in a corner. Cercas, who taught literature at the University of Girona for thirteen years, peppers his speech with bons mots and quotes from his favorite writers, and rushes excitedly to offer multiple answers to any question. More than once, he seemed thrilled to have been cornered, and, after venturing a couple of tentative responses, returned the following day with a better answer, having polished it overnight.

Soldiers of Salamis and The Impostor both begin with their narrators in creative crisis. Have you experienced similar moments of block, or doom?

JAVIER CERCAS

I suppose I’d say that, in a way, I’m always in crisis.

That feels like a joke answer, to evade a real one.

I’m being serious. You’re always insecure, always thinking the book you’ve just written will be your last …

But I’ve had two major crises, at least. The most serious was undoubtedly while writing The Anatomy of a Moment . That’s the one I write about in The Impostor .

I remember bumping into you one day around that time, here in Barcelona. You seemed tied up in knots.

It was a brutal time. I don’t want to say too much about it, but suffice it to say I had to go on meds.

Because of the book?

I had a young child, a dying father, and a hundred drafts. In order to figure it out, I had to change genres, change everything. Anatomy began as fiction—I’d intended to write a contemporary take on The Three Musketeers , using the events of the attempted coup of 1981—but it was completely without tension. The problem, of course, was that I was already dealing with a fiction. The coup is like Kennedy’s assassination—everyone has their own personal theory about what happened that day. If you don’t, you’re not a Spaniard.

Damn right.

We’ve all watched that footage a thousand times. For a while, even I believed the theory that the king was implicated in the coup—that it was staged by the intelligence service so that the king could put a stop to it, become the savior of democracy, and consolidate the monarchy. It’s a theory that the far right started floating during the trial, that the far left now upholds, and that, in a literary sense, sounds very appealing, as many conspiracy theories do. And by then it had practically cemented itself as truth in certain books. Well, after I decided that Anatomy had to be a nonfiction novel and started reporting, I spent a week speaking to the secretary-general of the intelligence service at the time of the coup, Lieutenant Colonel Javier Calderón, every afternoon, and to his subordinate, Captain Diego Camacho, every morning, until I realized that the truth was precisely the opposite. What I discovered was that Calderón had actually been one of the few high-ranking officers who’d remained loyal to democracy, and that Camacho, who’d been Calderón’s favorite disciple for some time, had taken revenge for professional reasons and accused him of staging the coup. That doesn’t mean there weren’t members of the secret service who did support the coup, or who went along with it—it was simply the small truth on which the bigger lie was built. Still, many people prefer to stick with tidy, convenient lies, fictions created by unscrupulous journalists on deadline and by authors who’ve written books upon books upon books feeding an industry. All this was fueled by the public imagination and by the coup’s participants themselves—men who seemed to have come straight out of a poem by García Lorca, with mustaches and tricorn hats.

From the Archive, Issue 249

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The Joy of the Memorized Poem

A panicked moment reciting William Butler Yeats in an MRI convinced the former poet laureate Billy Collins that oration is poetry's last, most enlightened defense.

By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. See entries from Claire Messud, Jonathan Franzen, Amy Tan, Khaled Hosseini, and more.

William Butler Yeats’ “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is about the allure of an imagined refuge. The poem’s distressed urban speaker fantasizes about fleeing the city and retreating to an idyllic Irish island; his fervid mantra is “I will arise and go.” For Billy Collins, author of Aimless Love , poetry itself is that sanctuary, a place to seek peace when times are tough. In our conversation for this series, he explained why the poems he memorizes become like cherished companions—and how he’s relied on Yeats especially in times of trouble.

Aimless Love selects work from Collins’s books published since 2002, starting with his collection Nine Horses , and also includes 51 new poems. Throughout, we see Collins as we’ve come to know him: In the new offerings, he’s accessible but enigmatic, lyric but unadorned, continually searching for the strange inside the ordinary. Collins is famous for the direct, clear style we see here—and we discussed this dedication to plain language, why he feels poems should balance mystery with transparency.

Billy Collins, one of America’s most celebrated poets, was Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. He’s published 10 books of poetry including The Art of Drowning and Horoscopes for the Dead. His poem “Grand Central” appeared on the back of millions of New York City MetroCards. He teaches at Lehman College and spoke to me by phone.

Billy Collins: I first came across “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” in college, with other anthologized poems by Yeats. At that time, I found some of his work difficult—especially poems like “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Easter, 1916” that required historical context. But “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” this little twelve-liner, had immediate appeal.

The sentiment is very clear: the speaker has committed to go off to an island, and imagines himself there. The language is gorgeous—it has a beautiful, rhythmic, almost hypnotic spell. It also has a very tightly organized structure, despite its lyric quality. Each four-line stanza makes its own argument, starting with the first grouping of four lines:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made; Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

First, he puts you on the island in this idealized retreat, where he’s going. He talks about the physical place, and his physical needs. He needs shelter—so he’ll build a cabin. And he’ll need food: he describes the beans he’ll raise and the bees he’ll keep for honey. (I don’t know why kind of dish you can make from beans and honey, but—okay.)

In the second stanza, the poem escalates. He pivots away from his material needs and addresses his spiritual needs:

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

In addition to honey and beans, then, he’ll have peace. And we see how this feeling manifests, as he takes us through the day from the “veils of the morning” until very late at night. He runs around the clock, showing how peace spreads in this diurnal way.

In the final stanza, he recommits, reiterating his intent to leave:

I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

He continually hears this “lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore,” but then there’s the shock: he hears this island sound in the city . He hears it “on the roadway,” and “on the pavements grey.” It’s all wishful thinking. He says “I will arise,” but he never does arise. He hears the sounds of the water lapping at the shore, but he hears it in the city. He hears it in London. And we begin to understand that Innisfree is an internal place, a fictive place, a refuge that calls to him from than inside, not a place that he can physically go and visit. The poem ends with a strong sense of this internal motion, going in and down, in the final line: “I hear it in the deep heart’s core.”

It’s a powerful, unexpected statement of a simple sentiment: I want to go somewhere better than where I am.

Shortly after coming across the poem, I heard a recording of Yeats reading it. I loved to hear his performance of the poem. It’s as though he sings it, elongating the words and phrases with his musical voice. It gives you the shivers.

In this recording, as he introduces his recitation of the poem, Yeats gets rather testy. It took him a lot of bother and time to put the rhythm and the sound into the poem, he says, and he’s not going to take it out in the reading. It’s a justification of his incantatory, singing style of reading aloud.

One of the disadvantages of poetry over popular music is that if you write a pop song, it naturally gets into people’s heads as they listen in the car. You don’t have to memorize a Paul Simon song; it’s just in your head, and you can sing along. With a poem, you have to will yourself to memorize it. That’s what happened to me with “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” I knew the poem well—through many re-readings and through teaching it in my classes—but at some point, I remember thinking “I’ve just going to get this poem down.” This process—going from deep familiarity to complete mastery—is a challenge and a great pleasure. In repeating different lines, your reading becomes more focused than you’ve ever had before. You become more sensitive to every consonant and vowel.

Years ago, I wrote an article called “Poetry, Pleasure, and the Hedonist Reader” in which I enumerate five or six of the principle pleasures of poetry. One of the final pleasures, for instance, is the pleasure of meaning—the moment when a poem’s emotional effect begins to crystallize into significance you can articulate. But the very final pleasure is what I called “the pleasure of companionship”—and this was a way of talking about memorization. When you internalize a poem, it becomes something inside of you. You’re able to walk around with it. It becomes a companion. And so you become much less objective in your judgment of it. If anyone criticizes the poem, they’re criticizing something you take with you, all the time.

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Some years ago, I had an MRI—and a very insensitive blockhead of a neurologist. The technology hadn’t been in wide use for very long, and I’d never had an MRI before. I assumed it was like an X-ray or a CT Scan. The neurologist didn’t prepare me at all. He didn’t tell me it was like being buried alive in a very high-tech coffin. He didn’t say, take half a valium. He didn’t say, don’t drink coffee.

So when I got there I was shocked to hear the technician ask: “Would you like music or no music?” I didn’t know what he was talking about. Then he pointed to this high-tech, plastic coffin. “You’ll be in there half an hour,” he said. So, I asked for no music—afraid I might get caught with Neil Diamond classics or something.

I’m not a claustrophobe, but you don’t need to be to feel claustrophobic inside an MRI. It’s like being buried alive. I lay there with my eyes closed, and pulled “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” up in my memory. I pulled the whole poem up before me in my mind. Slowly, I started reciting it. And then more slowly. After saying it straight through a number of times, I used the poem as a kind of diagram to focus on. I said just the rhyme words: tree / made, bee / glade, slow / sing, glow / wing, like that. Then I tried to say every other line. By the time the MRI was over, I was in the process of saying it backwards. And the poem—like a good companion—had saved me from really freaking out.

“The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is very soothing in that way. After all, it’s wishing for this rural and insular paradise from within the bowels of the city. It’s about hearing the call of a safe, peaceful place, especially while under duress. Yeats hears that call while he stands “on the pavements grey,” he says—but it could be “I hear it while I’m lying in the MRI.” Or “I hear it while I’m in jail for the night,” or “I hear it while I’m stuck on an elevator,” or “I hear it while I’m waiting for the bus.” You don’t need to be in an extreme situation, or you can be. Once you’ve installed the poem in your memory, it’s there to comfort you—or at least distract you—wherever you are.

I think that’s one reason I’ve always made my literature students choose a poem to memorize, even if it’s just something short—a little poem by, say, Emily Dickinson. They’re very resistant to it at first. There’s a collective groan when I tell them what they’re going to have to do. I think it’s because memorization is hard. You can't fake it the way you might in responding to an essay question. Either you have it by heart, or you don’t.

And yet once they do get a poem memorized, they can’t wait to come into my office to say it. I love watching that movement from thinking of memorization as a kind of drudgery, to seeing it as internalizing, claiming, owning a poem. It’s no longer just something in a textbook—it’s something that you’ve placed within yourself. And if you learn something written by a living poet, you might have have an edge on the writer himself. Not all formal poets memorize their poems—so you may own it in a way he or she doesn’t. It becomes an exciting thing.

Poetry tends to be easier to memorize than prose, because it’s designed to be memorized. A formal poem like the one we’re talking about—with a steady beat, and with lines that divide neatly into two—almost asks to be remembered. And because the poem is so perfectly organized into 12 lines, 3 four line stanzas, an ABAB rhyme scheme in this common rhythm, it becomes a kind of grid that you can move around in. Unlike prose which is complete, linear headlong movement forward—a poem is a design that displaces silence on the page. You can look at it as a thing to wander in. You can say every other line. You can play with the design by getting inside its structure. When you’re in duress, as I was in the MRI, you can put the poem to all kinds of diagrammatic uses.

Formal poems remind us that the origins of poetry lie in its mnemonic features, in rhythm, end rhyme, assonance, alliteration. All these devices were presumably ways of storing information, tricks pre-literate cultures developed to help commit things to memory before they could write things down. Poetry made it easier to recall basic survival information, like how to hunt or what to plant. But it also helped store vaguer or less material things, answers to questions about where your people came from, or what your tribe did hundreds of years ago. It helped store things about individual and collective identity, really. And the shamans or griots or bards—the society’s poets—would be the people best at retaining that information, and most enchanted with the process of learning it and reciting it.

Once we did develop written language, practically speaking, poetry had outlived its practical function. And so, poetry has taken on other uses: as a form of enlightenment, a way of recording your internal life. But basically it still retains the powerful features that we put to use before we had writing.

I’m aware of these things as I go about my own work. The things that make a poem memorizable are important to me: The cadence of the lines, the cadence of the sentences, the flow of the syntax. These things consume a lot of my creative effort, even though my poems aren’t formal, and they don’t run to a metronomic beat, and they don’t usually feature end rhyme. Free verse is obviously harder to memorize than formal poetry, but it’s easier to memorize than prose because it does come in lines that are units—a units of thought, units of syntax. I try very much to make the poem roll, and syntactically hold together, in the same way that Frost or Yeats would try, only without the exact metrics, and without end rhyme. I’m very conscious of the rhythm of it. And I think that poems of mine are somewhat memorizable for that reason.

Writing free verse, it’s hard to know exactly when a line has the feel or rhythm that you want. It’s hard to describe, though you know it when you feel it. For me, it’s often about gracefulness. I want graceful lines and graceful sentences. I try to write very simply. The vocabulary is simple, the sentences tend to be quite conventional—subject, verb, object. I try to be very unchallenging in syntax. I want the trip to be one of imagination and not completely of the language. But I’m also thinking about the reader, whom I’m trying to guide through an imaginative experience. I want the excitement of the poem—if I can generate some—not to lie in a fancy use of language, or an eccentric use of language. I want the poem to be an imaginative thrill. To take the reader to an odd place, or a challenging place, or a disorienting place, but to do that with fairly simple language. I don’t want the language itself to be the trip. I want the imaginative spaces that we’re moving through to be the trip.

I know that goes against some of the poetry you might encounter, where the language is the thing. Well, of course, poetry is all made of words and that’s what we’re working with here. But I don’t just want the reader’s staring at language to be the experience. I want to take the reader from Kansas to Oz: from a simple, familiar place, to a slightly unusual place.

Poetry’s kind of a mixture of the clear and the mysterious. It’s very important to know when to be which: what to be clear about and what to leave mysterious. A lot of poetry I find unreadable is trying to be mysterious all the time. It’s not so much a mixture of clarity and mystery, instead of a balance between the two. If the reader doesn’t feel oriented in the beginning of the poem, he or she can’t be disoriented later. Often, the first lines of a poem—many times, I find them completely disorienting. But I’d like to go to that place, but I like to be taken there rather than than being shoved into it. It’s like being pushed off the title into the path of an approaching train.

I think part of the reason for this is that the audience for poetry has decreased in recent years. There’s really only one audience for poetry these days: poets themselves. In the last thirty years, this has been good news and bad news. The good news is there’s all this poetry activity: open mics and workshops and readings and prizes. The bad news is that these events are populated largely by card-carrying fellow poets. Poetry’s not getting out to non-practitioners as much as it used to. And the anxiety these days is not the anxiety of influence, but the anxiety of clarity. I think a lot of poets feel anxiety about being clear.

And yet I think poetry is as important today as it’s ever been, despite its diminished public stature. Its uses become obvious when you read it. Poetry privileges subjectivity. It foregrounds the interior life of the writer, who is trying to draw in a reader. And it gets readers into contact with their own subjective life. This is valuable, especially now. If you look around at the society we live in, we’re being pulled constantly into public life. It’s not just Facebook, which is sort of the willing forfeiture of one’s own privacy. The sanctuaries of privacy are so scarce these days. Every banality, from “I’m going out for pizza,” to “JoAnn is passed out on the sofa,” is broadcast to the wide world. I think I read recently that we’re not suffering from an overflow of information—we’ve suffering from an overflow of insignificance. Well, poetry becomes an oasis or sanctuary from the forces constantly drawing us into social and public life.

Poetry exerts a different kind of pull on us. It’s a pull towards meaning and subjectivity. It’s the sound of lake water lapping by the shore. In “Dover Beach,” when Matthew Arnold describes hearing the waves coming up from the English Channel, he says Sophocles heard this long ago in the Aegean. And it’s one of those sounds that everyone has heard—Joan of Arc heard this, Cicero. Poetry presents us with these sensations: the things that cut through history, into the deep heart’s core.

About the Author

Billy Collins

U.S. Poet Laureate (2001-2003)

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The Best Cigarette

By Billy Collins

This poem reflects on the intimate connection between writing, smoking, and music, ending with the evocative image of a face illuminated by words.

Billy Collins

He has often been referred to as the “most popular poet in America.”

Poem Analyzed by Emma Baldwin

B.A. English (Minor: Creative Writing), B.F.A. Fine Art, B.A. Art Histories

‘The Best Cigarette’ by Billy Collins is a four stanza poem that is separated into uneven sets of lines. The first stanza contains three lines, the second: nine, the third: twelve, and the fourth: thirteen. Collins chose to write this poem in free verse , this means that it does not have a pattern of rhyme or rhythm . But, that doesn’t mean the poem is without structure. There are still moments of full and half-rhyme as well as a number of poetic techniques the poet makes use of.

Explore The Best Cigarette

1 Summary of The Best Cigarette
2 Poetic Techniques
3 Analysis of The Best Cigarette

Summary of The Best Cigarette

The poem begins with the speaker describing how there are many cigarettes he misses, but there are some that are more important than others. He goes through a number of examples, explaining that cigarettes after dinner, sex, and swimming are some of the most poignant in his mind.

The third and fourth stanzas are dedicated to the experiences with smoking he misses the most. He discusses how he’d always have coffee and a cigarette while writing if he thought it was going well.

Poetic Techniques

Half rhyme , also known as slant rhyme , can be seen through the repetition of assonance or consonance . This means that either a vowel or consonant sound is reused within one line or multiple lines of verse . One great example is “miss” and “tips” in the first stanza. These two words, along with “ships” that follows in the next line, make use of the same short “i” sound. Another example is in the third stanza with the ending words “mornings” and “going”.

One of the most important, and easy to spot, techniques used in ‘The Best Cigarette’ is alliteration . It occurs when words are used in succession, or at least appear close together, and begin with the same letter. For example, “single ship” in the second stanza and “steam” and “study” in the fourth.

Another important technique that is commonly used in poetry is enjambment . This occurs when a line is cut off before its natural stopping point. It forces a reader down to the next line, and the next, quickly. One has to move forward in order to comfortably resolve a phrase or sentence. The first line provides a great example as a reader has to skim down to the second, and then third, to find out what “many” is referring to.

Analysis of The Best Cigarette

Stanza one .

There are many that I miss having sent my last one out a car window sparking along the road one night, years ago.

In the first stanza of ‘The Best Cigarette’, the speaker begins by stating that there are “many“ that he misses. At this point, a reader has to guess, based on context clues, what “many“ might refer to. With the information provided in the title, one should come to a reasonable conclusion that he is referring to cigarettes. In the next two lines, that finishes off the first stanza, this prediction is verified. The speaker states that his last cigarette was “sent“ out of his “car window… One night, years ago“. Its been a long time since he smoked, and as he stated in the first line, there are many moments he misses.

Stanza Two

The heralded one, of course: after sex, the two glowing tips now the lights of a single ship; (…) and a smoke ring coasting into the chandelier; or on a white beach, holding one with fingers still wet from a swim.

The second stanza of ‘The Best Cigarette’ is a bit longer, stretching to nine lines. In the section, he goes through a number of the cigarettes, and the occasions associated with them, that he misses. The first, he refers to as “the Herald one“. He adds to the first line an additional description about this kind of cigarette, that “of course“ he would miss it. It is obvious, that the “after sex“ cigarette is one that would frequently haunt his mind.

What is interesting about this poem, and what makes it relatable to more than those who engage in the habit of smoking, are the occasions and the emotional connections. For example, in this first “heralded” cigarette, the speaker describes that it is not the act of smoking that he misses, but the connection between the” to glowing tips”. After the physical joining of bodies, the ritual smoking is another form of unity. The two disparate cigarettes come together to form “the lights of a single ship”.

He goes on, informing the reader that another kind of cigarette he misses is the one that comes at the “end of a long dinner“. It is an anticipatory cigarette, meaning it fills the space between dinner and the “wine to come“. Again, the cigarette is representative of all the dinners the speaker engaged in and the simple moments of transition . He presents an interesting image at the end of this example, that of a “smoke ring coasting into the chandelier“.

The final example is a cigarette the speaker would indulge in after swimming “on a white beach“. He recalls how he could hold the cigarette in still wet fingers and enjoy this small pleasure after exerting physical effort.

Stanza Three

How bittersweet these punctuations of flame and gesture; but the best were on those mornings when I would have a little something going (…) and on the way back to the page, curled in its roller, I would light one up and feel its dry rush mix with the dark taste of coffee.

The third stanza goes up to twelve lines. Now, the speaker is reflecting on what it means to look back on his life and know that in the future these moments will never again be the same. With the absence of the cigarette, something that was his own choice, and certainly a choice for the better, he will be missing what used to be a crucial part of his life.

He thinks of his previous “punctuations / of flame and gesture” and feels bittersweet. But, the memories he has conveyed so far are nothing compared to the cigarette-related moments he misses the most.

The rest of this stanza, and the one that follows, describe how the speaker, as a writer, would “have a little something going“. He would be writing productively and feeling as though he was making real progress toward something important. In this emotionally and mentally satisfying state, as well as with the pleasant sun coming in through his windows and music playing in the background, he would fetch a cigarette. It would come alongside coffee from the kitchen. The two sensations, that of drinking coffee and smoking, would mix together satisfactorily.

Stanza Four

Then I would be my own locomotive, trailing behind me as I returned to work little puffs of smoke, indicators of progress, signs of industry and thought, (…) when I would steam into the study full of vaporous hope and stand there, the big headlamp of my face pointed down at all the words in parallel lines.

The fourth stanza of ‘The Best Cigarette’ is the longest, stretching out to thirteen lines. Somewhat humorously Collin’s speaker describes himself in these moments of history as “his own locomotive”. The cigarette smoke would trail behind him as he walked back to his writing desk. He recalls the puffs of smoke in the air and how they seemed to him then, and still seem now to be “indicators of progress / science and industry and thought”.

Once again, as was the case and the previous examples in the second stanza, it is not the cigarette itself that is important to the speaker, but the state of mind to which it is related. That kind of cigarette, the one that marks artistic progress, was the speaker states, the best. In the final lines of this poem, Collins continues the imagery of trains and steam.

He describes moving steadily back into his study and feeling full of “vaporous hope“. The cigarette, and its related parts, which are represented as the functions of a steam engine, are intimately connected to the speaker’s contentment. They allow him to return to his study, and face “all the words in parallel lines“ on the page, ready to forge ahead and make even greater progress in his written endeavors.

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Baldwin, Emma. "The Best Cigarette by Billy Collins". Poem Analysis , https://poemanalysis.com/billy-collins/the-best-cigarette/ . Accessed 19 September 2024.

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The Best Cigarette by Billy Collins
Poem Analyzed by Emma Baldwin. B.A. English (Minor: Creative Writing), B.F.A. Fine Art, B.A. Art Histories. 'The Best Cigarette' by Billy Collins is a four stanza poem that is separated into uneven sets of lines. The first stanza contains three lines, the second: nine, the third: twelve, and the fourth: thirteen.

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3. The Pleasure Of Travel

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Billy Collins

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By Billy Collins

Explore The Best Cigarette

Summary of The Best Cigarette

Poetic Techniques

Analysis of The Best Cigarette

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