Did God (and Billy Collins) Just Tell Us to Get a Dog?

The passing of my most valuable writing tool, aka Stella the Arm Rest, aka Stella the Needed Distraction, aka Stella Who Once Slapped the iPad In a Fit of Jealously, has taken words out of me and left empty spaces. You can hear the wind whistling through them. So we've tentatively started talking about adopting again.

This weekend we met a little boy with pointy ears and a tongue longer and thicker than my wrist. Deaf, like our previous girl. We were weighing pros and cons in the car, gliding up the Garden State Parkway back to New York City. As we were discussing, Garrison Keillor announced poet Billy Collins on Prairie Home Companion, about to read his work on the radio. I hushed everyone, because when Billy Collins reads you don't matter to me. Unless you're on fire. Then you matter, at least until we put you out.

Important fact: Billy Collins is one of the wisest and wryest writers I've ever read. He makes me want to set myself on fire, as a mercy killing to prevent my family and friends from ever reading another swiss cheese draft of something I wrote. THE TROUBLE WITH POET blog is named for a line in Sondheim's SWEENEY TODD, and Collins' poem "The Trouble With Poetry."

Collins stepped to the microphone, hundreds of poems in his portfolio available to read from. He chose this:

THE REVENANT

I am the dog you put to sleep,

as you like to call the needle of oblivion,

come back to tell you this simple thing:
I never liked you--not one bit.

When I licked your face,

I thought of biting off your nose.

When I watched you toweling yourself dry,

I wanted to leap and unman you with a snap.

I resented the way you moved,

your lack of animal grace,

the way you would sit in a chair to eat,

a napkin on your lap, knife in your hand.

I would have run away,

but I was too weak, a trick you taught me

while I was learning to sit and heel,

and--greatest of insults--shake hands without a hand.

I admit the sight of the leash

would excite me

but only because it meant I was about

to smell things you had never touched.

You do not want to believe this,

but I have no reason to lie.

I hated the car, the rubber toys,

disliked your friends and, worse, your relatives.

The jingling of my tags drove me mad.

You always scratched me in the wrong place.

All I ever wanted from you

was food and fresh water in my metal bowls.

While you slept, I watched you breathe

as the moon rose in the sky.

It took all of my strength

not to raise my head and howl.

Now I am free of the collar,

the yellow raincoat, monogrammed sweater,

the absurdity of your lawn,

and that is all you need to know about this place

except what you already supposed

and are glad it did not happen sooner--

that everyone here can read and write,

the dogs in poetry, the cats and the others in prose.

Some might call that a blatant sign NOT to get a dog.

In our macabre little snow globe, however, it sounds like Billy Collins' just voted in favor of adopting the little beast with the giant tongue, so long as we have an action plan in place to be certain the right places get scratched. 

Billy Collins, Distraction Tactics, and Your Must-Read of Today

One of my favorite comment buddies recently asked, in response to my last post and the lack of new writings since then, if I've given up posting for Lent.

Ha-ha...well-played. And No. (Or at least no, not intentionally.)

I've truthfully been bogged down with some new literary undertakings.

So I'm going to do what all writers desperate for deadline extensions do in their low moments: distract you.

Specifically, I'm going to distract you with this excellent, awesome and easily digestible interview THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ran this morning with the excellent, awesome and easily digestible former poet laureate Billy Collins.

Read on, especially for this quote: "I found that 83% of American poetry isn't worth reading. That's my figure. The other 17% is hard to live without."

BACK WITH THE ZODIAC

Billy Collins enjoys something rare for a poet: name recognition. As his publisher gleefully notes, Mr. Collins's nine books together have sold more than 500,000 copies, and he served as the United States Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2003.

In his latest collection, "Horoscopes for the Dead" (Random House), Mr. Collins continues his penchant for writing witty, companionable verse that's often rooted in everyday matters (shopping for mattresses inspires one new poem, "Hell"). "I want my poems to be accessible in that you can enter them in the beginning," said Mr. Collins, a native New Yorker who now lives in Westchester County. "But as the poem goes along, its desire is to move the reader into less clear areas."

With April marking National Poetry Month, the Journal recently spoke with the 70-year-old about his own work and why a chasm persists between poetry and mass culture.

When do you decide you have enough poems for a collection?
That's in the very back of my mind. One swings like Tarzan—from book to book, instead of from vine to vine. But as I'm writing an individual poem, a book is the last thing on my mind. I'm just trying to write a good poem. I send my poems to a friend, a younger poet named George Green, who grades them: A, B, C, D. After a couple of years, if I have 60 or so poems—if I have a lot of As and Bs—then it starts looking like a book.

What's the inspiration for the title poem of your new book?
My poems tend not to be terribly personal in the autobiographical sense. I assume strangers are about as interested in my personal life as I am in theirs—which is to say not very much. But a longtime friend of mine, Michael Shannon [the co-founder, with Mr. Collins, of the Mid-Atlantic Review], passed away a few years ago. Our birthdays were around the same time of the year. I sometimes read horoscopes. So after he died, I'd read my Aries and shift over to his Pisces. I like the title in that it conveys a hopeless optimism.

For someone who grew up in Queens, your poems don't feature much urban imagery.
It's not there at all. My persona is semi-rustic or suburban. I spend a lot of time in New York City, but there's too much going on and I want to create a vacuum where very little is going on and then a poem arises out of something very small happening.

Do you think your popularity is due to the accessibility of your work?
It's embarrassing to account for one's own popularity. "Miss Kentucky, why do you think you're so beautiful? Well, my nose for one thing is cute." I've been very fortunate in being connected to a wider audience through NPR. It's been extremely critical to what's happened to me.

Do you accept that poetry isn't part of mass culture, or do you fight that perception?
There's this chasm for a reason, and part of the blame lays on the poets who are creating poetry that is a) willfully obscure and calls on the reader to do a fruitless amount of work, and b) assumes an interest on the reader's part in the poet's personal suffering. I read poetry because I want to be linguistically pleasured. As Poet Laureate, I was asked to go out and beat the drum for poetry. I found that 83% of American poetry isn't worth reading. That's my figure. The other 17% is hard to live without.

This month's issue of Oprah magazine has poets modeling fashion. Have you ever done anything silly to promote your poetry?
I wrote a poem for the 40th anniversary of Golf magazine, for which I was paid a certain amount of money, negotiated by my agent, and given two Scotty Cameron putters—one for me and one for my agent. I'm not sure if you know anything about golf, but Scotty Cameron makes very good putters. There, you got that out of me.