19 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
video recordings and links to them can be found at the Library of Congress
website. Students might consider the difference between reading a Collins
poem in a book and hearing him read it aloud. Is it more understandable,
accessible, and/or enjoyable when he performs it? Do you find that Collins’s
reading makes his humor more obvious? Dwight Garner does: Garner has
dubbed Collins a “stand-up poet” and described his readings as comedy rou-
tines. Does hearing a poem read aloud rather than seeing it laid out on a page
make it seem less like a poem? Ernest Hilbert writes: “There is very little
to indicate that what he recites is, in fact, poetry, aside from the occasional
announcement of itself as a poem.” In his reading of his own poems, what
qualities does Collins emphasize, and what does this emphasis suggest about
Collins’s views on poetry?
- Several of Collins’s poems respond to the work of well-known earlier poets.
“Monday Morning” comments on Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning”;
“Lines Composed over Three Thousand Miles from Tintern Abbey” calls
to mind William Wordsworth; “Musée des Beaux Arts Revisited” takes its
point of departure from W. H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts”; Petrarch is
mentioned in “Sonnet”; “Dancing toward Bethlehem” undercuts the serious-
ness of W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming”; and “Taking off Emily Dick-
inson’s Clothes” imagines and echoes the nineteenth-century poet. Hilbert
describes these poems as “pastiches, or parodies”; students might examine
the originals to see what Collins is parodying. Alternatively, students might
consider how Collins’s playful tone accompanies a critique of the way read-
ers—including students, teachers, and poets—approach, interpret, and/or
define poetry. How might Collins’s poems challenge the way we approach
so-called canonical works? How might we read the works of earlier poets
differently if we take a hint from Collins? In what ways would this approach
be positive? Negative? Collins comments on his parodies in his interview
with Joel Whitney.
- Various artists have produced short videos animating Collins’s poems “Budapest,”
“Forgetfulness,” “Hunger,” “No Time,” “Now and Then,” “Some Days,” “The
Best Cigarette,” “The Country,” “The Dead,” “Today,” and “Walking across the
Atlantic”; these videos are accompanied by Collins reading the works and can
be viewed at “Billy Collins: Action Poetry” (http://www.bcactionpoet.org/).
Students might analyze the clips to determine which aspects of the poems are
lost and which are highlighted in these interpretations. Why do Collins’s poems
lend themselves so easily to visual interpretation? How do they support the
views on poetry he has expressed in interviews and in his introductions to Poetry
180: A Turning Back to Poetry (2003) and The Best American Poetry, 2006 (2006)?
Alternatively, students may wish to try to create visual adaptations of one or
more of Collins’s poems themselves.
- As poet laureate Collins encouraged high-school students to read poetry
through Poetry 180, a project named for the number of days in a typical
school year but also for the number of degrees in a complete about-face turn,
the effect he envisioned reading the poems would have on students’ attitudes
toward poetry. The project called for students to hear or read a poem each
