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Michael McLeod
I teach a variety of writing courses at Rollins College, which is a gorgeous liberal arts college in Winter Park, which is about five miles north of Orlando - on the opposite side of town, in more ways than one, from Disney World.
I wanted to post a section of a story I just wrote about Billy Collins, former poet laureate of the united states, who lives in winter park. I am posting it because of our recent turn towards spiritual matters, as he references a very interesting Catholic retreat I had not heard of.
“Celebrity poet” may sound like an oxymoron, but Collins is the closest thing to it since Robert Frost. He’s all over YouTube, where you’ll find two TED talks, numerous lectures and seminars about poetry, and many of his own poems, most often being recited by him, but in one case by a three-year-old whose inflection is impeccable.
Some of the poems, including the one that stars a flame-throwing rodent, are accompanied by animations, which pleases Collins, an ardent fan of vintage Warner Brother cartoons and surely the first poet in history to count both Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Bugs Bunny as creative influences. He even wrote a dead-serious essay, in The Wall Street Journal, of all places, about the formative role Looney Tunes played in his early creative development, stretching his sense of imaginative possibilities as a child.
Frost was sentimental about the countryside. Collins has a bit of that in him, too, plus a dry, off-kilter sense of humor that lends the zip of standup comedy to his poetry readings and lectures. He has a deadpan, rumpled-scholar, perfect-pitch delivery that brings out both the tartness of the humor and the lilt of nostalgia in his poems. He’s written 13 volumes of them over the past 29 years, his last two, Aimless Love and The Rain in Portugal, having made The New York Times’ hard-cover fiction best-seller list, a rare distinction for a book of poems.
Collins travels to dozens of venues every year to give poetry readings and lectures, both on behalf of his own poetry and as a user-friendly ambassador of a genre that can surely use the boost. He is popular not just in the United States but abroad, where his poems have been translated into a dozen languages, from Italian to Mongolian.
“Billy is the poet of our time,” says Gail Sinclair, an American literature professor who directs the Winter Park Institute. “He’s the perfect storm. He brings intellectual clout to Rollins. And when I look out at the audience during one of his readings, I see people from all walks of life laughing and wiping away tears.”
“Billy touches a universal chord,” says Gilman. “He charms people.” Sometimes a bit more than she’d like: She’s simmered from the sidelines more than once as women on the book-signing line flirt with her intended to varying degrees of flagrancy. But then, she has also seen husbands and boyfriends, clearly dragged along to poetry readings against their better judgment, fall under his spell. She’s heard people come up to him to talk about attending funerals where someone’s favorite Billy Collins poem was incorporated into the ceremony. She’s heard others say the same of weddings.
Collins once discovered that his poems were being read, at mealtimes, to the Roman Catholic monks at New Camaldoli Hermitage, a religious retreat on the mountainous Southern California Big Sur coastline whose residents observe a strict vow of silence. A few have not uttered so much as a single “hi there” in decades.
“The friend who told me about it said these monks make the regular Benedictines look like Hells Angels,” says Collins.
Intrigued, he arranged to spent time as a guest at the monastery. He had a sense of being enveloped in a timeless expanse of communal wordlessness and observed it himself for the duration of his short stay, feeling like his own meager contribution to the silent realm “was like the contents of an eyedropper” by comparison.
If the monks of New Camaldoli sensed in him a kindred soul – he was, after all, raised Irish Catholic, and by Jesuits, no less – they weren’t alone. He’s been interviewed about the spirituality some see in his poems, and was asked to write the preface to The Best Spiritual Writing of 2011.
It was quite the metaphysical upgrade for a Daffy Duck fan whose first few poems were published in Rolling Stone. “That was a good gig,” he says of his time writing some of the hip, telegraphic poems the magazine used as back-page fillers. “They paid me 35 bucks apiece for them.”
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