Billy Collins to headline Jazzmouth 2008

Since its inception in 2005, the annual Jazzmouth festival has managed to bring an array of talented poets and musicians into Portsmouth. Last year’s events included live performances from internationally recognized Romanian poet Andrei Codrescu and inventive jazz bassist Eric Mingus, son of the great Charles Mingus. Multi-instrumentalist David Amram, who has been performing with jazz and literary legends like Jack Kerouac for more than 50 years, has made it to all three Jazzmouth celebrations and will return in 2008, joining this year’s headliner, former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins. The 67-year-old Collins, who has published eight collections of poetry and has also served as poet laureate of New York state, is known for his rejection of standard poetic forms and his retaliation against over-interpretation of poems. He is now a distinguished professor of English at Lehman College in the Bronx, where he has taught for more than 30 years. Collins will headline the Super Beat Night Extravaganza at The Music Hall at 8 p.m. on Friday, April 25. The following is an excerpt from an interview with Collins conducted by Chris Elliott on his radio show, “Culture Waves,” on 106.1, WSCA, Portsmouth Community Radio.

You think poetry’s on the upswing?
Well, in some ways it is, indisputably. When I was poet laureate, one effect of occupying that office is that you get interviewed quite a bit, and the two most frequently asked questions were, one, how to do you account for the upswing in poetry, the rebirth of interest in it all across America, and the second question was, how come no one reads poetry anymore?

So, there’s opposite sides of the same coin.
Well, I think the answer lies … There is a way, in a kind of paradoxical way, to answer both questions, which is to say that, yes, the audience for poetry is increasing, the number of reading venues and prizes and magazines and all poetic mechanisms are increasing, but—and this is not completely the case—but that the audience for poetry seems to be composed largely of people who want to write poetry.

George Carlin, who’s one of my favorite word guys, he says, the thing about poetry is there’s a lot more people writing it then there are reading it.
Yeah, well, I think there’s a great deal of truth to that, and I think there are certain poets out there who are breaking this kind of vicious circle, if you will, by bringing it into the audience of poetry non-practitioners, that is to say, people who have no vested interest. It’s like, if you have 600 people at the opera, probably 20 of them are fellow opera singers, but if you have 600 people at a poetry reading, it’s closer to 500 that are poets.

Do you write longhand? Manual? Composed at a keyboard?
I always compose by either pen or pencil, only because the keyboard, to me, makes everything kind of look done, look frozen, and writing on a page gives me a feeling of fluidity, that what I’m writing is provisional for the moment. And also, since I don’t know where the poem is going and I don’t want to know until I get there, I always feel like the poem, as I’m writing it, is working toward some kind of understanding of itself.

I read a little bit, and your response to the accusation of your poetry being accessible was pretty funny, in that it implies that your readers are poetically handicapped, which I thought was funny. And you, I guess, at least according to this quote, preferred the term “hospitable.” I have one for you: convivial. It’s very easy to be with your poetry.
Well, thank you. I think of a poem as a social engagement. I’m very conscious, or hopeful, at least, that there is a reader on the other end of things. Although, there’s a kind of paradox when someone asks you, “Do you write with the reader in mind?” Well, as you’re writing, the poem is not finished, so no one has read it yet, so the poem is actually trying to create its own reader, which will devour it. But the other reason I think at least in the beginnings of my poems I try to be welcoming to some degree is that welcoming really means orienting the reader, and really it’s a matter of telling the reader where we are and when we are, giving the poem an actual situation. And that’s something else I learned really from Coleridge. His situations are usually domestic. His poems often take place in a living room or in a backyard or by a fireplace. If the poem starts somewhere, the chances of it going somewhere else seem to be increased. If the poem kind of starts in the middle of some psychic nightmare, it usually is just gonna remain there. So the reason I begin my poems clearly is that I want to get away from that clarity and use the beginning of the poem as a kind of springboard into more ambiguous, more demanding (territory).

In your NPR performance at symphony space, you mention how your poetry changed from message poems as a youth, to poems created from nothing or very little. Do you think your poetry is still in that state or is it evolving further in terms of basic materials?
I think if I’m stuck anywhere it’s in that second stage, where the poem doesn’t have a certain message to carry because the poem is really not very sure of itself. If you go back to the sense of the poem developing from one thing to another, there’s a certainty in the beginning of the poem that I hope a reader can buy into. But as the poem progresses, it probably is losing its confidence, and certainly not building up enough confidence to deliver some truth or message at the end of the poem that has been earned through its thinking, such as “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.” So I think, for me, poetry takes us to places where prose can’t, and poetry comes into existence, you might say, at the very moment where the limits of prose have been exhausted. So if you write and write and write in prose and find, “You know, there’s still something I can’t say,” poetry is there, arrives at that moment, to offer the possibility of completing the thought.

Do you like to gig? Do you like readings or would you rather stay at school and write books?
Well, I do like readings. My father used to say that there’s a slice of ham in the best of us, so I don’t mind getting up and performing, it’s very gratifying to be outnumbered at a poetry reading, which is not always the case … It’s a different part of me, or a different part of any poet, because we tend to work in, I’d say, deep solitude. Poetry is probably one of the most private things you can do with yourself. And when I write, I write just in silence for one other reader, whoever that may be, and to find yourself with a microphone, a glass of water and a podium, and a bunch of people looking up at you, is not why you began to write. But it’s, I’d say, a happy byproduct.