Below is a link to a short interview with Billy Collins, a former Poet Laureate of the United States.

Interview with Billy Collins at the Edinburgh International Book Festival

 

Watching this interview, I was particularly interested in Billy Collins’s thoughts on audience. He says that when he writes his poems he’s imagining one person silently reading, without any other kind of distinction. He talks about getting his reader into a “listening position” and unveiling something just for them.

Poetry in particular is something that feels very private. This idea about writing for a single person is interesting because while a poem engages with just one person in a private way, it can engage differently with every single reader. Audience is something writers think about, but this is an interesting perspective that I think is really a beautiful way to write poetry.

As Billy Collins states in this interview, a poem is like a private interaction between the poet and the reader. If a poem is too public or has too much happening, it loses that sense of privacy so crucial to poetry.

While I agree with a lot of what Billy Collins is saying, I don’t think there are any rules you can give to poetry about what works and what doesn’t. It’s an endlessly varied art, and there’s no one way to categorize it.