My Bro-Mance

October 21, 2008

Sunday night I saw poet Billy Collins read at DG Wills in La Jolla.

DG Wills is one of the tiniest bookstores i’ve ever seen; it has used books, first editions, and black and white photos of writers and celebrities on the walls (like an autographed pic of 1950s beefcake, Samson and Delilah star Victor Mature). The bookstore isn’t much bigger than my old apartment in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn.

Still, the place was packed. Chairs and people spilled out of the bookstore and onto the street.

Collins’ new book of poems, Ballistic, is out now from Random House. The reviews have been ecstatic. He was the poet laureate from 2001-2003, and then again from 2004-2006. He’s published eight books of poetry, including one of my all-time favorites, The Trouble With Poetry, which features the now classic, The Lanyard– a poem I’ve taught numerous times in my Creative Writing classes. (watch him read it here).

Collins has been called a “Poet of the People” (in Poets & Writers magaine) and Entertainment Weekly says he “spins comic gold from the dross of quotidian suburban life…”; the NewYorker says he is a “poet of plentitude, irony, and Augustan grace”; and, according to The Christian Science Monitor he “reveals the unexpected within the ordinary. He peels back the surface of the humdrum to make the moment new.”

I just think he’s funny, and charming, and brilliant as hell. I love reading his poems, at night, before bed, and laughing. He gave such a great reading. Pausing at times, after reading the first line, to say something witty, or self-deprecating. He also often writes about the process of writing, about why he writes certain poems, about the choices he makes in lines and subjects and themes.

Before one poem he made reference to a Flannery O’Connor quote, that

The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.

He quoted Paul Valery: How do you know when a poem is over? Poems are never completed, they are only abandoned.

He signed my book. I was so flabbergasted.

And i’ve met many celebrities and writers:

Esther Williams. Betty Garrett. John Cameron Mitchell. Edmund White. MIchael Cunningham. Joyce Carroll Oates. Paul Muldoon.

But meeting him, I was nervous. As I waited in line with two of my students (the wonderful Van and Shelley) I kept thinking of what I could say that would be witty, funny, smart, charming.

What did I say?

Well, he looked tired. He’d been signing books for nearly an hour. I said something to the effect of:

Mr. Collins. If you’re hand is tired you can just lick your thumb and put a little thumbprint in the book.

Or something like that.

What the hell was I thinking?

I think he replied with:

Oh, yes. Maybe I should have a little stamp pad here that I can dip my thumb onto…

yadda yadda yadda.

What a fool I was! I was a bumbling, star-struck fool!

I don’t care. I got to see and hear Billy Collins read.

What a dream.

He read many new poems from the book, including the teeny poems:

Divorce

Once, two spoons in bed.

now tined forks

across a granite table

and the knives they have hired.

and

Oh, My God!

Not only in church

and nightly by their bedsides

do young girls pray these days.

Wherever they go,

prayer is woven into their talk

like a bright thread of awe.

Even at the pedestrian mall

outbursts of praise

spring unbidden from their glossy lips.

And one poem he didn’t read, but I discovered, and fell in love with the next day, was

Evasive Maneuvers