M. Scott Carter
CNHI News Service
June 25, 2009 05:37 pm
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LONE WOLF, Okla. — Billy Collins unwinds tangled wires of his iPod's earbuds and stretches them across a library table. He places the music player next to a spiral notebook.
The iPod stores just 37 songs, Collins says: "Some John Lee Hooker, some Bob Dylan, a little '50s Doo-Wop." He uses it to tune out noise in crowded places.
The device remains untouched here, in a remote lodge in Southwest Oklahoma, where the native New Yorker instead picks up a pen, opens his notebook and scribbles a few lines.
Collins has several best-selling books to his credit and a closet full of awards. He has been named a New York Public Library "Literary Lion," a Guggenheim fellow, poet laureate of New York, and for two terms from 2001 through 2003, poet laureate of the United States.
Since mid-June, he has been an Oklahoman. Chosen as a member of the faculty of the Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute, he has been sharing experiences with a select group of high school students. He recently gave an hour-long poetry reading and talk, a performance that prompted a spontaneous standing ovation.
Collins breaks from his work at the Arts Institute's home at the Quartz Mountain lodge for about a half-hour to talk about jazz music, writing, Oklahoma's stark beauty and poetry -- the good and bad.
"There’s an awful lot of bad poetry out there," he said, blaming poets for the fact fewer people read their work. "I’d say about 87 percent of the poetry in America isn’t worth reading.”
Poetry should be transparent, said Collins, whose own evokes images of rain, snow, jazz and even household items. Poetry, he said, should say something about the state of the poet and the poet's environment.
Congress asked Collins to do that, as poet laureate, to commemorate the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
Initially he declined. “I didn’t want to,” he said. “But later, as I thought about it, it disturbed me that I didn’t feel I was up to the challenge.”
Collins used vivid imagery and an alphabetic device for "The Names," a eulogy to the 2,974 victims of the attacks. He read the poem before a joint session of Congress specially convened in New York City on Sept. 6, 2002.
“I remember the tears running down Sen. Patrick Moynihan’s face," he said. "It was an interesting way to see the country’s politicians.”
In moments like those, Collins said, he understands the power of a poem.
Collins recently has found inspiration in this lodge on Lake Altus Lugert, about 35 miles north of the Texas border. He calls it an "end-of-the-line experience."
“There’s a railroad line here, but it only goes one way, to ship wheat out," he said. "And there’s only one road into the lodge. It’s like Oklahoma’s Shangri-la."
He calls Oklahoma a "beautiful, stark place," one he's been trying to describe to friends on the other end of a telephone. It inspires untold returns to his pen and notebook.
“For me, the future is basically the next poem," he said. "It’s always been that way. It’s always been one poem at a time.”
M. Scott Carter writes for The Transcript in Norman, Okla. He can be reached at scarter@normantranscript.com
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