The Use of Language in Poetry

VIDEO DESCRIPTION

Billy Collins, poet, discusses the use of language when writing poetry. He also talks about the pleasure in writing poetry.

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The Use of Language in Poetry bigthink Billy Collins language poetry pleasure poetry poems questions about angels writing poetry poetryThe Use of Language in Poetry

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Enjoying writing poetry is being down on your hands and knees with the language.  If someone carves swans and animals and so—that person loves so.  And if you write, you love the language.  So, it’s an opportunity.  Writing a poem is an opportunity to get as close to the language as pretty much you can get.

The other is joy, because it is a pleasure, I have no high mission that drives me to write poetry.  It is a very hedonistic activity and I write it for pleasure.  I go there to get pleasure and if possible to give pleasure.  One of the key pleasures is, and most poets would agree with this, is starting out not knowing where you’re going and finding a way to get there.

So the poem becomes not a whole expression of something you think or feel.  But it becomes a journey through itself to an ending and that ending is unforeseeable.  And in fact the ending is something that poem is busy creating.  It’s almost as if the poem the only to access that particular ending.

I have phone called “Questions about Angels,” and at the end of that poem an angel appears.  I did not know she existed before I wrote that poem.  And I guess strictly speaking she did not.  So, I think of that poem is simply— the drive of the poem is to bring her into being, to bring its sound ending into being.

Education, I mean teaching literature, allows you as a writer to reread literature, the kind of literature you want to reread—semester after semester.  Reading up and teaching also gives you time to write.   I think I find the teaching in poetry go write together and I do not see any conflict there.  There is an interview type question that involves the word balance and it’s often.

How do you balance, you know, having six children and starting this new company and writing a novel and being a ballerina at the same time.  How do you balance all those things? If the question were, I am not trying to put question in your mouth, but if the question were asked to a poet, it would be something like how do you manage to balance writing a poem every two weeks and doing absolutely nothing in between.  I mean, that would pay you know.  How do you deal with delicate act of balancing there?

It is not a labor intensive job—Max Spearbound went quoting this and said that “the hardest thing about being a poet was, knowing what to do with the other 23 1/2 hours of the day.”