I saw Billy Collins last Wednesday.
Billy Collins? Is that what you're thinking? Let me help you get in the right frame of mind:
Robert Frost. James Dickey. William Carlos Williams. Robert Penn Warren. Lord Alfred Tennyson. Robert Pinsky. William Wordsworth. Anything?
The names read off like a who's who of poetry. They are all there, most of them at least. Check it again. All of them have those awful sketch drawings up at every Barnes & Noble.
Their names have been pounded into your head by all your favorite and not-so-favorite English teachers. ETS has made sure that you know who each one was, and what artistic period they wrote in.
Each one is a poet laureate, or, as the Library of Congress likes to call them, a "lightning rod for the poetic impulse" of their respective country. Chances are, you may have even read a few things they've written.
Billy Collins was announced as the United States of America's newest poet laureate last June. That means, by some standards at least, that he is the cream of the crop, the modern day Wordsworth.
He is "the man" when it comes to verse and meter and feet and rhyme and all that good stuff. He's the guy you'd want to inscribe your epitaph, the person that might just have been able to write a love poem that Julie would have actually liked on Valentine's Day.
He might have even been able to smooth over President Bush's harsh "axis of evil" comments, and he definitely would have been able to help you with your ENG 344 homework.
He's more than that, of course, but that's just the good stuff. He has written numerous books of poetry that have (for the most part) been warmly received for their ability to take the banal aspects of everyday life and blow them up into the very essence of what it means to be alive on this earth.
Collins has made a career out of his art, pouring his thoughts and emotion into a pen and paper to create some of today's most powerful poems. He has joined a long tradition of "the greats," become one of "the big names," and will (most likely) have one of those sketches up in Barnes & Noble one day, after he dies.
And, to think, I saw Billy Collins. When he was alive and kicking, no less! Well, not, exactly kicking, but speaking and reading.
You see, those wonderful minds over at 185 Nassau Street have a program in which they lure some of today's most provocative writers into reading their words to a group of wide-eyed listeners. The authors get up in front of a little podium, pull out their tattered notebooks, look down to the page, and read. It's amazing.
There is something about seeing the words come alive, getting a glimpse at what the words are like to their creator, feeling the power of interaction both between the author and his work, and the author and the ponderous audience. It's, well, magical.
And yet, I wonder if Billy Collins got what he expected. I mean, when you are invited to speak at a college — say, Princeton for example — I'd think that you'd expect to be peering out into a crowd of young undergrads and graduates that were looking for that magic.
I'd expect that you'd want to see tomorrow's poet laureates eagerly ready to pounce on each phrase spewed from your mouth, excited to think that you may be solidifying someone's love for poetry. I'd bet you'd expect to see the last traces of acne and overt nuances of raging hormones, and perhaps feel as though you may just changed someone's life. Forever.
But that isn't what he got. Instead, Billy Collins read to old men and women, far past their prime, far past their ability to have "life-altering experiences."
After all, men and women who are more commonly referred to as "grandparents," that have more liver spots than pimples, who have spent the last twenty years of their lives in retirement — these people have already lived their lives. Altering it is a thing of the past for them.
Yet, far more than half of the crowd that sat in the Jimmy Stewart Theater was old enough to remember the date that Mr. Stewart was born on (May 20, 1908). It took real effort to spot any students in between the plentiful elderly crowd (you know the kind, those old folks that audit almost every class here). It was like searching for the prize in a box of Cracker Jacks, maybe even harder. And it made me sad.
All I could do was think about how packed Dillon Gym must have been at that moment, teeming with people working off the beer gut they had received the weekend before just so that they'd look good enough to get a new one on Thursday. I could imagine the hundreds of mindless Instant Messenger conversations that were leading into oblivion. I cringed at the thought of people lost in endless hours of study, bit my lip when the image of late afternoon cat nappers came to my mind.
People everywhere, so focused on their routines and the trivial daily events that they had failed to realize the opportunity they were missing; Princeton students all over this campus, thinking that their econ homework was more valuable than a fleeting moment with one of the greatest poetic minds of our time; people passing up the chance to see Billy Collins — a modern day Wordsworth — while he was alive and not just a sketch at Barnes & Noble.
It made me sad.
You see, seeing Billy Collins didn't change my life forever. But, I won't ever forget it. I can't tell you how many papers I've written that I can't remember having ever written, how many jogs I've taken that have led nowhere, how many naps I've taken that I couldn't have postponed. In the long run, it is those things that shake us from our daily routine that will stay with us forever.
And here at Princeton, we are privileged enough to get people like Billy Collins to take us away from our routines, snatch us out of the "learning to live" so that we may simply "live."
Yet, far too often, these privileges go unused, ignored and tossed to the side of Prospect Street.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled — the one with Billy Collins. And that made all the difference.
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