Billy Collins has always been on of my biggest inspirations as a poet. I discovered in my freshman year of highschool and at first I didn’t really like him. Actually, I didn’t really like any poets but I remember one Christmas morning my grandpa handed me a small stack of poetry books. He told me he knew I was having trouble with my poetry and he saw these at a garage sale for a few dollars and thought they might help. Stuck in between Robert Hass and Yeats was a book by Collins. I think the cover attracted me more than the actual poetry did.
I didn’t really touch the books for about a month or so, until one day I was assigned to write about poem. Poetry was terrifying to me, I thought it was way to over my head for me to even consider being a poet. So I turned to the small stack of books that had been collecting dust silently on my desk. I reached for the Collins book and flipped through, until one poem stuck out to me. It was about yellow bathtub ducks he’d found in a drug store one night. Don’t ask me why I liked this poem so much because I wouldn’t really have an answer for you. But that one poem opened something for me. Pretty soon I started seeing the beauty in all of his poem.
The simplistic language, the beautiful imagery, the emotions I found hidden in each sentence. Collins isn’t the type of writer to write directly about his emotions. He always finds an image or an action to zone in one and he makes you feel it for yourself, instead of describing it. And I can tell you now, that for someone who hates talking about her feelings or sharing any type of personal information with stranger, this type of technique really intrigues me.
In a lot of ways Collins opened the door to the poetry world and sort made me see that not everything has to be complicated pros and metaphors that nobody understands. It was be simple, pleasant. You don’t have to rip through your emotional conscious or tear apart traumatic memories to get a good poem. Sometimes you can just write about the rain drops of a window or yellow bathtub ducks you find in a drug store.
Sometime when I’m sitting in front of my computer not being able to come up with anything, I’ll feel that fear inside of me. That fear that I’ll never be able to write poetry the way I’m “supposed” too, but Collins always finds a way to remind me that there will never be a specific way to write poetry. You write what you feel, what you see, what you experience. You write your truth.
– Sierra Lunsford, Web Editor
As artists, it’s easy to get stuck in a rut of our own art form, and forget to look at the other ways people can express themselves. An aspiring actor might go to plays, but never visit any art museums. A filmmaker could attend dozens of movie premiers but never pick up a novel. Sometimes, the best cure for stasis in our own art form isn’t to continue to immerse ourselves in it. The best cure can be to remove ourselves completely, and experience artwork that’s completely different.
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