By
Shana Heiser
Arizona Daily Wildcat
UA Poetry Center presents Billy Collins
"Doing a little dance on the page" is what keeps poet Billy Collins motivated to write.
He said if his poems "pass the ultimate test of the page," then they have survived.
"The reading or performance is extra - it's gravy," Collins said. "The page is where the poem lives or dies."
Collins, who has published six collections of poetry - some best-sellers - comes from New York to read his poetry in the UA Modern Languages auditorium tonight.
He said his poetry begins with humor but transcends to deeper subjects, such as death.
"I think of humor as a seductive device," Collins said. "I think humor is a way of regarding life, and it tends to work in poems sometimes in the way of engaging the reader on a basic human level."
Instead of complicating his poems, Collins begins with a social device -humor.
"I'm copying a social mannerism, because when you meet someone, you don't suddenly start talking about dire things," he said. "You might start telling them a joke and then the more serious things come later."
He does not claim originality in using death as his primary choice of subjects, but he said he views it as a way of "italicizing life."
"Poetry has a great way of accommodating itself to subjects and moods, but there are not that many of them - celebration of life, grief, a sense of wonder at things," Collins said. "Most of these themes have been written about again and again, but we still keep writing about them with as much energy as if we were doing it for the first time."
Collins' longtime interest in language, among other contributing factors, fuels his desire to write poetry.
"I liked what happened when I discovered you could rub two words together and make a fire," he said.
The image of being a poet also appealed to him because so much power could be contained in a single poem, he said.
"I thought poets were not talkative and able to avoid being overbearing by their ability to condense into very small spaces, usually one page, a great deal of meaning and a great scope of observation," Collins said.
However, his first forays into poetry began under what he calls a "disguise."
"Everyone learns to write by imitating other people," Collins said. "You begin by disguising yourself as someone else. If you're lucky, the disguise falls off and you have a real self under that disguise."
Collins said he imitated the writing of many poets as he was growing up including Wallace Stevens, Richard Brautigan and Hart Crane.
"In the beginning I didn't know what I was doing and I had nothing to say," he said. "I tried on different costumes, and the costumes would be different poets, and gradually something formed underneath those costumes."
Collins claims his only fortŽ is poetry - he does not delve into other writing genres.
"Writing a novel or short story is as foreign to me as playing the tuba," Collins said. "I wouldn't know how to begin."
A Guggenheim Fellow, Collins work has appeared in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review and Harper's magazine, among other publications. He is also an English professor at Lehman College in New York.
