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August 22, 2012 00:07
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Constructing a poet
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# http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/482/the-art-of-poetry-no-83-billy-collins | |
INTERVIEWER | |
If you had to construct a poet out of whole cloth, so to speak, what attributes would you give | |
him or her? | |
COLLINS | |
A Frankenstein monster! First, a sense of attentiveness. Then wanting to hang around the | |
language. If you look a word up in the dictionary and twenty minutes later you’re still | |
wandering around in the dictionary, you probably have the most basic equipment you need to be a | |
poet. It’s just liking the texture of language. I think there’s another thing, a kind of | |
attitude—an attitude of not ever getting used to being alive, of not ever taking your life for | |
granted. | |
There’s a very deep strain of existential gratitude that runs through a lot of poetry. It’s | |
certainly in haiku. Almost every haiku says the same thing: it’s amazing to be alive here. | |
There’s a little haiku: “A cherry tree in blossom / In the distance / I hear a dog barking.” | |
Those two things have nothing to do with each other, except the fact that the poet was there to | |
see and hear them. So the haiku is saying, I was here. “Kilroy was here.” To appreciate the | |
wonder of that, you have to imagine the absence of that, of not being there, of nonexistence, | |
right? I consider poets to be a part of a larger group of people who don’t have to survive | |
major surgery or go through a windshield in order to feel grateful for being alive. It | |
shouldn’t require such traumatic experiences to feel grateful. So I think a love of language | |
and a sense of gratitude would be two ingredients in the recipe for making a poet. |
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