Billy Collins workshop, Book Passage, June 19, 2021

Billy Collins, In The Driver’s Seat of Poetry: A Live Poetry Session

In The Driver’s Seat of Poetry: A Live Poetry Session

Some 700 of us from around the world joined Billy Collins for a three-hour Zoom workshop at $75 a pop, hosted by Book Passage in Corte Madera. When I did the math, I thought, who says that poetry doesn’t pay? Crime still pays better. Still, I was looking forward to taking the workshop with Billy as I had long admired his poems and have used them when I have taught Poetry Out Loud workshops because they are so approachable. I like his narrative personae.

Billy Collins, two-times US poet laureate, also offers free poetry chats on Facebook, most weeks, usually Tu., Th. at 5:30 PM, EST. The workshops, more like fireside chats, sans fireplace, evolved as a response to Covid isolation. Check it out.

For our workshop, Billy gave us a reading list, and asked us to write out all the model poems in longhand before the workshop. Since I had only just discovered the workshop literally minutes before it actually began, I was scrambling to catch up. She who hesitates, is…  That was the fastest three minutes ever spent, I managed to contact Book Passage, pay the tuition, get my link, and and then get my Zoom link to work. I was in. A grand slam. There are times when the universe conspires to work with you. I was all damseled about and out of breath. Even still, I managed to scribble out Sonnet 73. But it was a rush to get to the finish line, and that also meant that the entire tone of my experience of the residency was wide-eyed and out of breath.

Billy Collins opens with a discussion on the forms of poetry and then offers us a caveat, saying, this is not how I normally teach, this is not a writing workshop, nor is it is it a lecture. (For lack of a better definition, it’s craft lecture. OK, so, call it a poetry session.) He says, I’m not trying to look at a poem as a finished product but to return imaginatively to the scene of the crime, to draw the ink off the page, and put it back into the inkwell, and to see the work as a work in progress, to deduce the intentions of the poet. (In other words, a poem is never finished, only abandoned….)

He calls this analysis process the playing card method. Kind of like reverse Pictionary. He asks us to revisualize the poem as a living thing. Pick any card, cover up most of the poem—except for the first stanza, and ask yourself, where is the poet going? The following lines should be unforeseeable, not lead to the inevitable conclusions. I think, a poem is like a present. You unwrap it line by line. There should be surprise and delight with the unfolding of every line.

During the action-packed three-hour workshop, we progressed from the sonnet, to the villanelle, to looser forms. I was unfamiliar with many of the poems. We examined staging, shaping, and stanza techniques. Poem as archaeological artifact. We turned them over and examined their intricacies like ancient Celtic brooches. Billy says, Arrangement is the central function of art. Poet as wrangler, someone who is at work. Think not about self-expression, but something for the reader, our poems should at least be something, said Mary Oliver. Oof, I garbled the context of that quote, sorry. No rewind button.

The work of poetry… Mid-sentence, Billy had an epiphany, he taught an event and immediately launched into an explication—all left brained pursuits—but then he said, But that’s not how I write. That’s the last thing I’m doing. We scramble to catch up with that segue train. Whoosh!

Collins asks how does a poem mean, citing John Ciardi. Then he launches into Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, telling us of Petrarch, how the sonnet was imported from Italy to England, and then perfected by Shakespeare. (I didn’t know that.) He said, it’s a fill-in-the-box kind of writing with ornate language. (Not to mention rhymes. I don’t do rhymes.) Billy said, There are four boxes inside the main box, for quatrains, and a couplet. Form and structure. Inexplicably, I think of those tallboy bureaus with secret drawers for cufflinks, hidden in closets. Don’t ask.

Billy Collins give us an example of a sonnet: I’m old, no, I’m really old, yeah, I’m about to die. Then he adds a twist of paradox—by the way, I’m also one foot in the grave.  Shakespeare does this is to evoke maternal empathy in the reader. Not sexual eros, but agape. Notice how every quatrain begins with Thou? Shakespeare manages to extract love via pity. All those piteous creatures, lovestruck and on the brink of death. Died for love, and all that.

Billy says the ABAB iambic pentameter is the heartbeat that runs through English poetry. Metaphor number one is the year, metaphor number two is a day, it’s chronological, until you get to metaphor number three, which is fire, and then there is more death language. Ask yourself why did he invert the language, Few do hang… It slows the reader/ listener down so that Shakespeare can deliver the punchline. Break the pattern. Yo! You don’t have very much time to love me, so you better do it right now.

Our second poem, Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold was a huge departure from the sonnet. Sure, I read it decades ago in college. Do I remember anything about it? No. Great title. All those impossible white cliffs. What beach? Billy points out that it is comprised of four stanzas, with irregular rhythms. Each stanza is a small symphony, or a movement. Billy compares it to carpets, he says these stanzas are like scattered area rugs. I want to know if the floor is polished, and if the cat skitter around the corner, do they become flying carpets? He points out the use of enjambment, and notes the invective. He asks who is the You in the poem? Seascape to his new bride, to sadness. He asks where do we go from here? 

Note how the poet inserts a historical note on Sophocles, who heard it long ago…. Veritas. He explains: we find in the sound, a thought. Arnold brings in an authority figure, Sophocles, and then introduces an allegory— there once  was…. The sea of faith. Billy mentions, There is a bit of 19th century Darwinism at work, the mechanism is the poem as artifact. This was a time of societal upheaval and massive changes. Think of it as wave action. (The Theory of Natural selection, and those Galápagos tortoises and chatty finches turned religion and poetry on their ears.)

I  realize once again that having a tight grasp of a historical timeline is necessary to unpack this poem, indeed many poems in the great canon of literature. I mean, Yeats’ Slouching Towards Bethlehem is odd unless you know it’s a foil, an anti-war poem set against the backdrop of the carnage of WWI. Presentism or revisionist history just won’t work here. 

Billy points out how Arnold changes rhyme schemes, says they’re not isometric stanzas. Look at the beginning and the end of the poem—ask how did the poet get there? why? An apocalyptic scene, and then the shift to the personal in the third stanza; he brings it back home to the bride: from love, or climatic simile, to confused armies, the fog of war. Love is like war? Versus the philosophic pessimism. Arnold makes up his own rhyme schemes, it’s semi-formal, not strictly inherited from the great body of literature.

Our third poem is Dylan Thomas’ Villanelle, one of my favorite poems. Billy says the hardest part of writing a villanelle is getting the first two lines and the last two lines right. When you get those lines down, then 42% of the poem is already written because of the repetition: do not rage. It is an imperative, written in terse present tense verbs. Billy says the real genius of the poem is in describing the characters, brave men, good men, wise men, wild men, brave men. And you, my father… The poem is 19 lines long, and has only two rhymes, night and day, and they are internal rhymes. And yes, there is a desperate rhythm and it’s a little forced.

Frost talks about miles to go before I sleep. He repeats the line twice, which intensifies the meaning. Of the 14 line stanza, there are 140 syllables. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle. Dylan‘s poem is woven on a loom, it’s not a carpet, not a throw rug. When Yeats was asked, what inspires you, he said, “looking for the next rhyme.” The surprise of night, is this a deathbed scene? Something denied to so many of us during these Covid times. A message, to let the person go. But Dylan says, don’t go. 

Collins reads his own poem, Villanelle about a villanelle. A ditty of a poem about a poem. We puzzle over puzzle boxes. Billy points out that the African gray is the desperate rhyme. How to write a villanelle. Instructions. Begin.

The first hour slid by fast. We take a short break. I madly read and scribe the next batch of poems, trying to catch up, so I listen with half an ear. There are audience questions. Someone asks, how do poems become classics? Billy bats back. The controversy of the canon, does the good stuff rise to the top? I think of the Irish word Uachtarán, which means the cream that rises to the top, which is also the term for the president of Ireland. Billy says that Browning wrote a lot of terrible stuff, even Frost. The best poems become the classics because they have a popular appeal, that’s what gets published. But what about Emily?

How much do we, as poets, expect of our readers? He points out local references. I think of James Lee Burke‘s novels. The rawness of humanity amid those carved metaphors and throwaway lines of pure poetry embedded within the storyline, serve to delight the senses, not to bog you down. Billy says, Don’t use a reference and make it the price of the poem, as a linchpin, but as an anecdotal reference. Don’t be like Ezra or Tom the banker.

Billy compares poetry to a cookbook, he likens it to a recipe. What is the poem trying to do? Poetry is the opposite of a cookbook. Poetry is a shelter for ambiguity. Not didactic. No answers. Multiple meanings. All of this adds to the texture and flavor of a poem. 

Another question is about the use of autobiography within a poem. Because I am racing ahead to catch up, scribbling out the next batch of poems in longhand, I don’t record the answers. These are snippets. Someone else asks, when is a poem done? When is it complete? Billy says when poets are weary of it. (wary?) They’re not thinking of big themes. How do I get out of the poem? How do I know when to stop writing? I don’t finish a poem, it’s a lot like travel writing. If your poem has enough forward momentum, then you are done with it. 

Billy illustrates this point with the story of a kindergartner’s painting. Parent asks, How do you know when the art is done? Teacher says, I just know when to take the painting away. Before it turns to mud. But I think to myself, sometimes it’s important for little artists to let things gravitate towards primordial soup, to destroy their love, if only to know when to stop in the future. 

Billy mentions Elizabeth Bishop who said the most dangerous point is when you know the ending is about to begin. Poetic closure, how poems end. The epiphany that comes unbidden when everything is rainbow, rainbow, rainbow. Yeah, If you know how a poem is going to end before you write it, then why bother writing it? Most poems rebel against the poems of the past. Poetry is always experimental and pushing against the limitations of the past. kill all the ancestors.

Part II. Yeats said a poem is a visual presence on the page. He presents us with three quatrains in When You are Old, with ABBA rhymes. Tight, organized, iambic 10 one-syllable lines, when you are old and grey… He asks, who is the You within the poem? Love hid his face. Personification, a poem to Maude Gonne. 

Poor Yeats propose to Maude 50 times. He got so frustrated he even proposed to her daughter. So there’s some spite involved. Your faded beauty is certainly a spite line. When you are old, and But I truly loved you… An echo Shakespeare’s sonnets. The unworthy love of these people, which Yeats took away in the first line of the stanza. Yeats is guilting her. He says that love equals personification in action, a mythic figure. Love rises into the sky, hides his face. He quits himself of love. An over the top dramatic gesture. Poor Yeats, so unlucky in love, and so in love with words.

Why write in rhyme? John Ciardi said that even in our games we demand difficulty, whether in chess, hockey, the surmounting of difficulty is the challenge. The Yeats poem is a rigid structure, built with intention, he is like a tax accountant with too much work to be done. The challenge is in the game.

Morning Swim, by Maxine Kumin, this poem is written in couplets that also rhyme. Billy analyzes the poem’s structure right away in order to unpack it. Tetrameter, 42 lines, written in couplets. He notes that the tetrameter went off in the last stanza, but the interruption serves to slow us down. The self-contained units, all those periods make it like a ladder. Also the rhythm of swimming itself is invoked. I was the well that fed the lake, the sea—it becomes a metaphor. 

It’s a Biblical song, both concrete and visual, visceral and specific. The ending of the poem is in ecstasy. Her bones are sinking, she becomes a well that feeds the lake. She becomes a metaphor. The religious dimension to swimming. She was a swimmer and an equestrian, an athlete. The visceral rhythm is apparent in her poems.

We are moving into looser poems, but they are not formless. Adam Zagajewski, Impossible Friendships is next. This is a list poem written in couplets about people on the street, familiar strangers. He says, Here are some examples…And then he goes into that professional voice, uses handles, for example, and then lists the stream, the porcelain cups. They were like snapshots or fleeting moments. 

Billy says, I don’t know what it means, and that’s OK. I can roll with it. The ending is accusatory. Since after all, you don’t know who you are. I didn’t like the poem, I didn’t see it coming. I’m annoyed with both the poem and the poet. A snarky spite poem. The accusatory ending is a frame. He so smugly uses words like, “for example,” and “after all.” But I give Adam, who died in March, a hall pass, as he wrote in Polish, and this poem is a translation. so some of this may be the attitude of the translator, a la Bly, staining the page.

We move onto Philip Booth’s poem, Crows. Billy says to look at the poem like how you would look at a person for the very first time. He says it’s written in tercets, that is, three-line stanzas. The form instills confidence in the reader. I think, always take care of the reader. This is what I tell my young students. Yeats wanted swans. Philip wants crows. So, weirdly controversial. Nine crows and one sentinel. He breaks down the social distance in groupings. And the poem begins and ends with the word, So. 

So, what’s the glue? The counting holds the poem together. It’s more important than the meaning of the poem. I think of how I tend to count things when I drive if I’m stressed, so I make up haiku to channel that urge, tapping out the syllables on my steering wheel for comfort.

Poet as observer. Reader brings, and imbues meaning to the poem. Wordsworth: the structure is the poem. Like a Rothko painting. Poetry is harder than writing. I laugh. Ya think? But, paradoxically it’s also easier. It’s the language of the psyche. The imposition of form, that’s what the reader wants. Some kind of formal constraint, or is it restraint? I’m not so sure about that. When I was young, see, I thought I hated poetry because I thought it always had to rhyme. I hated the singsongy predictability of most rhyme schemes. I took a long time arriving to poetry. A poem is a study, a still life, versus a conclusion. The old adage, show, don’t tell, remains a basic poetic truth.

We move onto Kay Ryan’s poem, Turtle. It’s a study, and the title focuses the reader. Who would be a turtle? And then she compares it, with a simile and a rhyme. Slope defeats hope. Her only levity is patience. A question is asked: what has happened to rhyme and meter? A vintage question. Rhyme went underground and became internal, rhymes invaded the body of the poem. When you come across a vowel sound in a Kay Ryan poem you will find its counterpart hidden within the poem. Look for it. Lottery and pottery. No singsong rhyme schemes, she’s methodical in the placing of those internal rhymes. She brings you closer to the struggle of being a turtle with internal rhyme and she uses enjambment on steroids. All her poems are one stanza long, a poem is an acoustic echo chamber. 

William Carlos Williams’ Flowers by the Sea. I thought I knew all of William Carlos Williams poems. this one catches me by surprise. WCW thought that TS Eliot made poetry too referential. Too much work. And Williams wanted to bring poetry back to America. He uses simple photographic images, no weighty references, no hyperbole. He uses concrete imagery. 

The organizing principle is the couplet. The poem is one long sentence, a clause, whereas the flowers are likened to the waves. His line endings are run-on phrases, he waits for us to catch up, and then slides from one line to the next, using enjambment—which creates tension. The flowers and the ocean exchange characteristics. There are pastures and the daisies/seafoam, tied versus the tide coming in, those restless flowers versus the sea. The sea changes and turns into a flower. Just like how The Red Wheelbarrow changes into a chicken. I snort, so much depends. Ima gonna need some Depends if we don’t take a break soon.

We take a short break, and resume with more questions. Someone asks, what about prose poems? James Tate and Russell Edison? write interesting prose poems. Once you get rid of the lines, it’s not a poem, said Henry Taylor. Poetry is an arrangement of lines whose length is not defined or determined by the width of the page. I think of Whitman’s I Hear America Singing.

Billy says, I am not a fan of prose poetry. It’s like standing outside the cathedral of poetry. I try to write good sentences and good lines at the same time. No lines, then it’s not poetry. It’s something else. What about the prose poem as an opportunity to write bad poetry? Crafting is a form. If you just write about yourself, is that poetry? Poetry is the most egotistical of all arts. I wandered lonely as a cloud. The “I” in the poem not suppressing the ego. Ai, ai, Hyacinthus! the petals in vision.

I think of all the beginning poets angsting away at open mic, reading raftloads of I feel, therefore I am poems. More like, I suffer, therefore I feel poems. And I think, why not just get on with it? Cut to the chase. Give me imagery, give me metaphor or give me death. But everybody has to begin somewhere.

Poetic voice versus the conversational approach? Is this poetry? Billy says, Yes this is poetry if it’s elevated speech. There’s a style I called the lifties, completely monotonous sing-songy poems, and it puts you to sleep. (Think Valley Girl speak. Like?) Billy says, I am talking on the page, my work is conversational and undramatic, with an unemotional tone. Poetry‘s job is not to BE emotional, but to make the reader feel emotional. Matthew Arnold is too busy presenting a wildly effective image arcana to become emotional.

How to begin a poem, and what is lost in translation? American idioms, brand names don’t translate well. Nor do puns or jokes, I add. The equivalences have to be able to be translated and rendered and wrestled into a new culture. They have to also make sense within the new culture. They have to resonate.  I saw some unintelligible, if obscure Frost and Levertov poems in Russian anthologies, as poetry is so often what gets lost in translation.

Someone asks, where do you get your ideas? Billy said, I begin with an observation, a common ground. The poem begins small and ends large, and I don’t know where I’m going. I never know how one of my poems manages to get written, and I’m normally afraid to ask. Or how it will end, otherwise I would give up. The real pleasure of the poem is discovering an ending. 

Billy drops a quote by Helen Vendler, something about the arrangement is the sole function of art. Archibald MacLeish said a poem should not mean, but be. Carolyn Forché’s prose poem, The Colonel what about removing the self from the poem? The persona? (Sorry, I lost the plot there…derp.)

Part III, the poem we read next is Billy Collins’ American Sonnet, also a villanelle. I had to laugh out loud, it’s so cheeky. He invokes Petrarch’s muse, the sonnet writing about writing, it’s tongue-in-cheek, it’s a parody. A sonnet is based on courtly love, it’s unattainable, there’s no sex, only heavy panting. Blow out the lights and come at last to bed. Get on with it.

We also looked at his poem, On Turning Ten. Billy is quick to tell us it is a persona poem, it’s also a counting poem, a fantasy versus reality. Writing about the self on a significant birthday. Billy makes fun of the self-adulating poems commemorating a birthday. He invents a precocious 10-year-old, and in his child-voice, he creates a list of diseases. He addresses the reader, he is self-aware. One, two, four, seven, nine. Free fantasizing and magic.

He invokes, But now I am 10 and putting away childish things. This is the beginning of sadness. What began as a parody suddenly became real. Ouch! The last stanza, the reflection, the shining light, Billy chalks it up to his Catholic school education, and Shelley‘s Ode to the West Wind. I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed. So Billy cheekily says, I skin my knees. I bleed.

We look at his poem, Questions about Angels. And I think of how many angels dancing on the head of a pin. Billy again refers to scholasticism, mentions Thomas Aquinas, and applying reason to theological skulduggery—the reference to the Catholic school and college. In formal poetry, you know the rhymes are coming and there are expectations. Games people play with poems, there’s a playfulness. Of all the questions you might want to ask about angels… 

It’s an If/Then poem for adults! I’m beginning to construct a poetry lesson in my head. Have kids freewrite on the other idea of a boy and a girl, a rickety bridge, and then make a reference to prayer cards. Add guardian angels in stanza three. What happens if you ask wild questions like Neruda’s impossible questions, and then juxtapose them with practical questions? Then, what happens if an angel fell off a cloud… Then what? If an angel delivered the mad world from the lofty realms.

Billy points out that there were all male pronouns in the poem, so he added a She. How many dancing angels? She is very real, dancing to a small jazz combo. Ha ha ha I had to laugh. And now it is very late, even for musicians. Now, that’s late! Or early. Either way, the crack of dawn is sizzling in the frying pan, sunny side up.

We segue into I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakely‘s Version of Three Blind Mice. A playful, if grim, Grimm’s fairy tale analysis juxtaposed against a kitchen, listening to jazz while cooking. The poem asks impossible questions, how do the mice become blind? The dichotomy of the literal versus the fantastical. Mice without eyes, or even tails. The cynic at work. Chop, chop, chop. Oh, Sweeney! How the mice will play. Then, there’s a segue to time present, dicing parsley, onions, that’s the frame. Those crazy questions, the imaginary answers, the concrete imagery and actions help to anchor the reader. 

Collins’ final offering, Direction is a poem about friendship, a shared past. There’s a lot packed into this poignant poem that delves much deeper than the other poems. It resonates on many levels, from the acute observations of nature, time past, to the present, and a glimpse into the future. 

Four stanzas, four movements set the scene.  Stanza one: vivid concrete imagery sets the scene, climbing the hill. Stanza two: advice, the best time to go, the joys of stopping there, the future, you will be able to see, hear, invoke the senses. Stanza three indulges philosophical relationships of the observer. But it is hard to speak of these things/how the voices of light enter the body/and begin to recite their story. And Taking the vast outside into ourselves. The sensorium. Stanza four: like saying goodbye to the recently dead, the Irish habit of watching people leaving. You don’t turn away until they disappear, because it is considered to be bad luck. We, all of us, can’t seem to turn away, even though our time together is up.

This is Billy at his best, unveiled, unplugged. No clever artifice intruding or separating the poet and reader. It invokes hiraeth, a Welsh term, a deep homesickness, or a longing for a home that never was. 

Still, let me know before you set out.
Come knock on my door
and I will walk with you as far as the garden
with one hand on your shoulder.
I will even watch after you and not turn back
to the house until you disappear
into the crowd of maple and ash,
heading up toward the hill,
piercing the ground with your stick

– Billy Collins

Finis

My pissy prose riff off on the Billy Collins workshop: Pick any color. The ink returns from the page to the darkness of the inkwell. The next line is always waiting in the wings, unforeseeable, but inevitable. An attempt to see the poem as a living thing. Tight received forms, pro temp forms for the moment. All those OCD poets rearranging words from the chaos. We are always at work, it’s never done. We’re making the poem for the reader. Self-expression is way overrated. Tidy poems, said, Mary Oliver, is the work of poetry. Mohler said life is parabolic, no, he said life is paperwork, and manipulates the reader into empathy. Burn the paperwork. Burn the poets. We must find the time for sound, I thought. Poem is artifact of time and culture. You need a timeline. Matthew Arnold builds the reader a tidy scaffold of comfort, then removes it, brutally in Dover Beach. Like a hangman. Poet as manipulator. Dylan is in the imperative present tense of what is. Facing the death bed, not to rage is the norm. He rages. He rages. Is the audience willing to meet the writer halfway? Poet as observer. Counting a murder of crows. Reader imbues meaning. Kay Ryan’s turtle was an inside job. Who won the race? The vowels said they’ve abandoned their end stations and have given up their guns for the well-meadowed line. Puzzle poems and acoustic echo chambers to sound off outside the cathedral of poetry. A prose poem is an opportunity or an excuse to write bad poetry. I’m bad, way bad. Wordsworth was the epicenter, I, eye the ego centric at the center of it all. Poetry‘s job is to make the reader emotional. The pleasure of a poem is discovering the endings. Get in, get out early. A poem is a work order. Poetry is all courtship and no payoff. There is no sex, only a lot of panting. The sonnet is a proscribed birthday genre, but only if it ends in a zero. Null and void. Avoid the wet spot. Sadly, the self adulation urge is not to put away childish things. Begin with a generalization. Then get pacific. The argument of Aquinas’ angels and scholasticism, the theological skulduggery of education gets in the way of poetry. But all those questions about angels and asking them silly questions. Then what? An angel dancing alone in an empty room, to a jazz combo, what about all those secularized angels? What did they have to say? And what about She? Did she want to hang up her wings in order to eternally count pinheads onto infinity? Sounds like a hellish form purgatory to me. Oh, Beatrice! Where art thou?

Some of this became a prose poem, After listening to Billy Collins speak. What, Ma, no lines? Was I being snarky, or what?

Note bene: I grew weary transcribing my notes, and I abandoned them, as I also had to deal with multiple Google Blogger crises, Google was rabidly removing my posts for “going against community standards,” an algorithm malfunction. I lost at least 15 posts, salvaged most, but not all of them—before they were mostly restored. An AI troll glitch. My takeaway, always back up your blog early and often. Needless to say, I was distracted. It took the wind out of my sails, and I put this task down, to be recorded later. So, any errors or misrepresentations of Billy’s comments, is due to my inability to reconstruct from my transcripts. Mea culpea. Rev. 1/18/22