Billy’s history
Poetry came to Billy slowly.
He wanted to be a poet since he was in high school.
He started fooling around with words.
Billy’s father was not a poetic type but brought home Poetry magazine to Billy in high school.
In Poetry magazine, Billy read contemporary poetry. At school he read traditional poems by male, dead, with beards, with three names.
Contemporary poetry talked to Billy using the language of everyday life.
He would find words that go together that shouldn’t but are cool and marked these on the margin. He appreciated the verbal sparks of the poems even without comprehending them.
Patrick Cavanaugh answer when asked how he became a poet: I started fooling around with words and at some point it became my life.
Getting published
He wanted to be a poet but it was an aspirational wanting.
==He didn’t know how to be one: maybe write poems in the side, keep it secret, get published in a magazine, have a book a poetry and sell a thousand copies, and that’s it.
==Being published in poetry is a big deal, a big step. There are lots of unpublished poets.
==His first two books were chapbooks published by presses that have now disappeared.
- Pokerface: Poems by Billy Collins (25 pages), put together by a hippy couple in LA. Literally handmade.
- These chapbooks were what he had under his belt until he reached his forties.
==He was published in very tiny magazines other people hadn’t heard of. He reached a point of desperation and anger where he didn’t care about where he got published.
This changed gradually.
==Something very important happened with an editor named Miller Williams at the University of Arkansas Press. He sent 40 poems to this editor he never met. He sent the poems back with 17 or so poems with paper clips and included a brief note: The poems I have paper clipped, you have something there. The other poems do not live up to the standard set by those poems. If you can write more poems that with the paper clips, I’ll publish your book.
That was enough for Billy to put the pedal on the metal.
He threw all the other poems. Held on to the paper clipped poems. In the next two years, he dedicated himself to writing poems up to the standard of those poems.
==Those paper clips were his MFA. Miller Williams showed him where he was good and asked him to live up to that standard. Instead of importing another poet’s standard and making you live up to it.
Live up to your best.
First book: The Apple to the Storage Paris
Sailing Alone Around the Room
Another Reason I Keep a Gun in the House
The Lesson
Winter Syntax
Advice to Writers
Insomnia
Books
My Number
Introduction to Poetry
Schoolsville
A history of weather
Forgetfulness
The History Teacher
Consolation
Osso buco
Purity
Nostalgia
Budapest
On Turning Ten
Workshop
Tuesday June 4 1991
Nightclub
Pinup
Center
Design
Fishing on the Susquehanna in July
To a Stranger Born in Some Distant Country Hundred of Years
Picnic, Lightning
Morning
Bonsai
I chop some parsley while listening to art blakey’s version of “three blind mice”
Afternoon with irish cows
Shoveling
Japan
Victoria’s Secret
Paradelle for Susan
Lines lost among trees
Taking off emily dickinson’s clothes
The night house
The death of the hat
Passengers
Aristotle
Sonnet
Idiomatic
The waitress
Iron bridge
Scotland