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Poet Billy Collins, a professor of English at Lehman College, is on a roll. He recently signed a six-figure contract with Random House for his next three books of poetry, and the New York Times reports that “with his books selling briskly and his readings packing them in, Mr. Collins is the most popular poet in America.” The recent page-one story in the Times article dealt with the current impasse between Collins’s new and former publishers. “His popularity has provoked one of the odder publishing battles of recent memory, pitting a huge commercial publisher against a small academic press over a literary poet,” the Times reported. “It is an argument about money, with a distinct David-and-Goliath plot, but it is also about publishing ethics and the right of an author to determine the direction of his career.” For many years, writing was a sidelight in his teaching career at Lehman. Collins’s early poems appeared in poetry journals and university publications. Two years after his first book was published by the University of Arkansas, his manuscript “Questions About Angels” was selected by the poet Edward Hirsch as a winner of the annual National Poetry Series competition. It was published by Morrow and that began to establish Collins’s literary reputation. The University of Pittsburgh Press published his next three books: “The Art of Drowning” (1995), “Picnic, Lightning” (1998) and “Questions About Angels” (reprinted from Morrow). Together, these books have sold more than 50,000 copies—virtually unheard of for a poet. His CD “The Best Cigarette” sold out in its first pressing. Currently, three of Collins’s books are among the 16 top-selling poetry titles at the online bookseller Amazon.com, which puts the Lehman professor in the company of poets like E.E. Cummings, Robert Frost and Walt Whitman. Therein lies the rub. According to the Times, when Random House asked University of Pittsburgh Press to reprint 61 of Collins’s older poems for a new volume, Pittsburgh said no because those books are money-makers, a relatively rare occurence for an academic press that, like Pittsburgh, is a nonprofit arm of a university. Both Collins and Random House maintain that the new books will make the older ones even more popular and, for his part, Collins has offered to take a reduced royalty if the sales of his Pittsburgh books dip.
A crucial moment in Collins’s meteoric ride to national popularity came in 1997, after “Picnic, Lightning” was published. Garrison Keilor, who had read several of Collins’s poems during the “Writer’s Almanac” feature on National Public Radio, invited him to appear on his show, “A Prairie Home Companion.” Shortly after that, Mr. Collins was interviewed by Terry Gross, host of the NPR show “Fresh Air.” His book sales surged and requests poured in from schools and colleges for his readings. “As I’m writing, I’m always reader conscious,” Mr. Collins told the Times, explaining the quick connection to his work experienced by many readers encountering him for the first time. “I have one reader in mind, someone who is in the room with me, and who I’m talking to, and I want to make sure I don’t talk too fast, or too glibly. Usually I try to create a hospitable tone at the beginning of a poem. Stepping from the title to the first lines is like stepping into a canoe. A lot of things can go wrong.” Asked if there was a theme to his work, Collins told the Times, “I think my work has to do with a sense that we are attempting, all the time, to create a logical, rational path through the day. To the left and right there are an amazing set of distractions that we ususally can’t afford to follow. But the poet is willing to stop anywhere. The ur-poem for this is Frost’s ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.’ There’s no reason to stop there; the horse knows that. But the human is willing to stop for some reason that is beyond the comprehension of the horse. And it’s that willingness to slow down and examine the mysterious bits of fluff in our lives that is the poet’s interest.” Collins’s fans are a diverse group ranging from high school and college students to famous writers such as John Updike and fellow poet Edward Hirsch, who has called him “an American original—a metaphysical poet with a funny bone, and a sly, questioning intelligence.”
Collins’ skills as a “catcher of the wry” was displayed in his choice of title for “Picnic, Lightning” and is one of the poems in it. As he explains: “It is a meditation on sudden death in the world we live in—a plane crashing into your house, that sort of thing. I took the title from what the playwright Tom Stoppard called the greatest parenthesis in all literature, a sentence early in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita in which Humbert Humbert confides, ‘my very photogenic mother was killed in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three’.” As Collins sees it, the new book from Random House will give him an opportunity to reach readers more efficiently. “There’s so much hand-writing from cultural quarters about the sad size of the audience for poetry,” he told the Times. “But here I am, writing poetry that is getting out there, and we’ve reached this impediment. It’s really frustrating. I’d like to forget all about rights and permissions and royalties and get back to writing poems.” Collins was born in 1941 at a New York hospital where, he likes to say, the writer William Carlos Williams worked as a pediatrician. Collins went to parochial schools and Holy Cross College, then earned a doctorate in romantic poetry at the University of California at Riverside. He lives on a farm in Somers, New York, with his wife, Diane, an architect.
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