Poet Billy Collins likes to leave his audiences ‘pleasantly disoriented’

Midway through a conversation with poet Billy Collins, talk turns to the topic of inspiration, and how a writer recognizes the small moments around which one might build a poem.

“It’s a good question because that’s something that isn’t written about much,” says Collins, 83, the best-selling former poet laureate of the United States. “It is a habit one develops, I think, over years. Recognizing, through all the waterfall of daily experience, and taking in everything around one in this fairly confusing world, how does one take out one little thing to write about?

“It has to do with recognizing the potential in something,” he says. “So you don’t have a sort of strict attitude toward it but it might just go somewhere.”

Take, for instance, the time when Collins thought of the late poet Donald Hall, who was then almost 90 years old.

“I was imagining that he and I, we became friends,” he says. “We both lived to be 200 and what would that be like? I don’t know. That just occurred to me when I was thinking about his age and his death. And if we were alive at 200 what would we think? What would the world be like?

“The stars held their place. Except for – this is the way the poem ends – that one star, which used to be the elbow of the constellation the Archer, somehow has gone missing.”

That’s typical of the odd, unexpected way he sometimes ends his poems.

“I like the poem to begin with something very familiar, and then end with something a little weird,” Collins says. “Or another way to put it, begin with something that is undeniably true and easy to get the reader on board, and then work the poem in certain directions so that we end up more in Oz than Kansas.”

Collins, whom the New York Times once called “the most popular poet in America,” comes to the Samueli Theater at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa on Monday, Jan. 13. He will recite poems from his new collection, “Water, Water” as well as older works, and converse with Paul Holdengräber, the founder of the New York Public Library’s public program series “Live From the NYPL.”

In a conversation edited for length and clarity, Collins talked about writing poems while driving a car, the role that mortality plays in poetry, touring with indie musician Aimee Mann, and more.

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Q: How do you choose which poems to read at an event like this – certainly some from the new collection?

A: Yeah, I’ll dip into ‘Water, Water’ because it’s the book du jour. It’s been out only a month so it’s still got wet paint on it. I also have a playlist of poems from a lot of other books. It’s just a column of poems and page numbers, poems for when I do a reading in public.

More generally speaking, I do write some humorous poems, and I try to jump around the playlist so that it doesn’t get too funny. If the audience is having too much fun, I’ll try to read something much more serious, and then I’ll go back to entertaining them. The end effort is to have them leave the auditorium pleasantly disoriented.

Q: I’ve read that you write by hand and then put it into the computer later. Do you write every day? Do you have a place you like to write?

A: I have habits, but not ones that I tend to keep. I don’t write every day. I like to write first thing in the morning if I’m going to write at all, and I’ll often sit down in a certain chair, by a window, by some French doors, where there’s a lot of sunlight coming in.

I often get someone else’s book, like Charles Simic is someone I like to read before I write, or an anthology of Chinese poetry maybe, because that tends to be a very simple diction. Something might happen and something might not happen.

You know, when someone new comes to the house and I show them my so-called study, I say, ‘This is where the magic fails to happen.’ And with that, the waste basket is the writer’s best friend. But I can also write on the fly, in an airplane or a train, or even driving. If I’m driving in the United States, I have a right hand free and I can write on the passenger seat. This is more difficult for driving in Ireland or Britain, so I don’t write as much on the road.

Q: Some of your poems seem to reference places or things from your life. How common is that?

A: This book, ‘Water, Water,’ is much more autobiographical. I mean, my wife and I did go to Amsterdam and we checked out the place where Chet Baker died. I do go to a racetrack. I gave a lecture on Emily Dickinson. I stop at a roadhouse and hear Percy Sledge. So yeah, it’s much more autobiographical.

I’m not sure why. My persona has basically been very speculative and not autobiographical. I don’t write about experiences, per se. I’m more of a ‘invent the experience by taking a 200-year-old Donald Hall and then making something out of it.’

Poets get a lot of suggestions. It’s usually an event in itself: ‘You should write about the Hindenburg,’ or something. Well, that’s way too much for my poem. My little persona is basically looking at a flower or walking the dog or just very immersed in everyday life.

Q: You mention this collection is more autobiographical and you’re not entirely sure why. Has aging influenced the work you write?

A: Well, it does and it doesn’t. It doesn’t in the sense that the main engine that drives poetry is mortality, or as I like to say, the thrill of mortality. I think Kafka was asked, ‘What’s the meaning of life?’ And he said, ‘The meaning of life is that it ends.’ Which is nice and final.

When I was starting to write awful poems in high school, they were about mortality, many of them. They were about ‘seize the day’ and ‘gather ye rosebuds’ and ‘stop and smell the roses’ and all that. I was 17 years old, and I had a long way to go, as it turned out.

I’m not denying that I’m aging, as we all are. I’ve never thought of it that way, but you could have something there. Perhaps I’m running out of experience, so I’m writing more about direct experience. I try not to do that in most of my poems because I don’t want the poem to be driven by memory.

I want the poem to be an event that’s taking place as they read it, not a dredged-up memory about going fishing with my Uncle Charlie or something. I find memory poems claustrophobic. They really limit the imaginative play that’s possible in poetry.

Q: You grew up in New York but came to the University of California, Riverside, for your master’s and doctorate. What brought you West, especially to Riverside?

A: I’d never been west of the Mississippi except to go to Dallas a couple of times. I’d certainly never been to California. And this was back when Joan Didion was writing about California a lot. You could tell she was writing from the front lines. California always sounded interesting, and they offered me a (teaching assistant position) and free tuition.

I don’t know if you remember this sports car called the Sunbeam Alpine. Well, I bought that in London and brought it over on the Queen Mary, stopped at my parents’ house for a few days and I drove it to California. I got to Riverside about 10 o’clock at night, about to begin my graduate studies, and I stopped at a gas station there.

There was a kid there, and I said with my East Coast sensibility, ‘So where’s the river?’ He gave me a look like I might have been saying, ‘Where’s the monkey who runs the movie theater?’ or something. He thought for [a minute], said, ‘Well, there’s a river bed.’ I had pictured this river running through.

But I wasn’t disappointed. There was no smog in Riverside at the time. There were orange groves everywhere, and the orange blossom aroma perfume would just waft into your house. It was beautiful and amazing.

Q: You studied romantic poetry there?

A: Because I’d gone to a Jesuit college, I had four years of Latin and two years of Greek. I took a course out there in Chaucer and this professor, Don Howard, knew that I’d been living in the Middle Ages in Massachusetts, so he kind of adopted me as a graduate student. But it was the ’60s in California and suddenly High German and Latin didn’t seem like the thing to do.

So I started reading Wordsworth and Coleridge and, I must say, I abandoned him and went over and wrote a dissertation on them. But I’m still kind of a recovering medievalist.

Q: Tell me about working to make poetry more accessible, like the Poetry 180 program for high schools you started as poet laureate or the time you went on the road with Aimee Mann.

A: Touring with Aimee Mann was a blast. We were driving in a van all over California and Texas. Also, the big thing about that was that musicians get encores. As you know, poets don’t get encores. You read the last poem, it’s over. So we’d be backstage after, the applause would keep going on and on. She said, ‘Come on, let’s go out there again.’ Really? [Laughs]. That was a really interesting dessert. I also interviewed Paul Simon four times on different stages.

The 180 Project [for which he chose one poem for every day of the school year] came out of me being poet laureate. I didn’t want to just bang the drum for poetry because I think a lot of poetry, in fact about 83 percent of it, is not worth reading. But I could bang the drum for poetry I liked, and I had the sense that high school was sort of the place poetry went to die.

I could pick 100 poems that I already liked, but it was hard to get 180. I tried to pick poems that were clear, sometimes funny. It started as a website for high school teachers. Then it became a book, and then a second book. I think poetry belongs not just on the shelves of libraries and bookstores, it belongs in public.

I just retired from the Poetry Society of America, but we were responsible for Poetry in Motion, that’s on busses and trains and subways everywhere. And recently, we teamed up with Meals on Wheels so that now, at least in New York and a bunch of other cities, you get a little poem with your meal delivered to your door.

Q: So what was it like when the New York Times called you ‘the most popular poet in America’? You walk into a room of fellow poets and they’re all like, ‘Oh, here comes the most popular poet in America again’?

A: Yeah, well that’s one reason I don’t hang around with a lot of poets. Listen, someone’s got to be the most popular. I don’t how they quantify that. I’m not gonna fight it.

Billy Collins in conversation with Paul Holdengräber

When: Monday, Jan. 13, 8:00 p.m.

Where: The Samueli Theater at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts, Costa Mesa

Information: https://www.scfta.org/events/2025/billy-collins