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.

A little overgrown, (I think there is)                                

Their sole work is to represent the age,                            

Their age, not Charlemagne’s, — this live, throbbing age,      

That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires,                      

And spends more passion, more heroic heat,                                      

Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms,                                

Than Roland with his knights, at Roncesvalles.”

-Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Aurora Leigh

As I was reading Aurora Leigh over the summer, this quote really struck me. It says something very important about what a writer is supposed to do. Writers aren’t meant to look back and harp on a time long gone; they are meant to represent their own age with all its faults and triumphs.

Today’s world is a complicated place; it’s not all pretty, and nothing can be said for everyone. No one writer can represent everyone, but in a small way, they can represent one perspective on the modern world. As a writer, I want to use my voice to show “this live, throbbing age” from my own cultural perspective. I want to write with honesty and passion about the fascinating people of my time.

The writers of today should paint the world as they see it, not as it was seen hundreds of years ago. This age is just as artistic and beautiful as any other, and a writer has the opportunity to shed light on that and define what their culture and the culture of the modern world really means. Elizabeth Barrett Browning is absolutely right about what a writer’s job is; a hundred years from now, writing should shed light on what our world is, what we value, what we believe, how we interact. And if the writer is honest, people a hundred years from now will understand what they have written and will see how humanity at its core doesn’t really change much even when the setting is entirely altered.