Everyday moments, caught in time

Combining dry wit with artistic depth, Billy Collins shares a project in which several of his poems were turned into delightful animated films in a collaboration with Sundance Channel. Five of them are included in this wonderfully entertaining and moving talk -- and don't miss the hilarious final poem!

I'm here to give you

your recommended dietary allowance

of poetry.

And the way I'm going to do that

is present to you

five animations

of five of my poems.

And let me just tell you a little bit of how that came about.

Because the mixing of those two media

is a sort of unnatural or unnecessary act.

But when I was United States Poet Laureate --

and I love saying that.

(Laughter)

It's a great way to start sentences.

When I was him back then,

I was approached by J. Walter Thompson, the ad company,

and they were hired

sort of by the Sundance Channel.

And the idea was to have me record some of my poems

and then they would find animators

to animate them.

And I was initially resistant,

because I always think

poetry can stand alone by itself.

Attempts to put my poems to music

have had disastrous results,

in all cases.

And the poem, if it's written with the ear,

already has been set to its own verbal music

as it was composed.

And surely, if you're reading a poem

that mentions a cow,

you don't need on the facing page

a drawing of a cow.

I mean, let's let the reader do a little work.

But I relented because it seemed like an interesting possibility,

and also I'm like a total cartoon junkie

since childhood.

I think more influential

than Emily Dickinson or Coleridge or Wordsworth

on my imagination

were Warner Brothers, Merrie Melodies

and Loony Tunes cartoons.

Bugs Bunny is my muse.

And this way poetry could find its way onto television of all places.

And I'm pretty much all for poetry in public places --

poetry on buses, poetry on subways,

on billboards, on cereal boxes.

When I was Poet Laureate, there I go again --

I can't help it, it's true --

(Laughter)

I created a poetry channel on Delta Airlines

that lasted for a couple of years.

So you could tune into poetry as you were flying.

And my sense is,

it's a good thing to get poetry off the shelves

and more into public life.

Start a meeting with a poem. That would be an idea you might take with you.

When you get a poem on a billboard or on the radio

or on a cereal box or whatever,

it happens to you so suddenly

that you don't have time

to deploy your anti-poetry deflector shields

that were installed in high school.

So let us start with the first one.

It's a little poem called "Budapest,"

and in it I reveal,

or pretend to reveal,

the secrets of the creative process.

(Video) Narration: "Budapest."

My pen moves along the page

like the snout of a strange animal

shaped like a human arm

and dressed in the sleeve

of a loose green sweater.

I watch it sniffing the paper ceaselessly,

intent as any forager

that has nothing on its mind

but the grubs and insects

that will allow it to live another day.

It wants only to be here tomorrow,

dressed perhaps

in the sleeve of a plaid shirt,

nose pressed against the page,

writing a few more dutiful lines

while I gaze out the window

and imagine Budapest

or some other city

where I have never been.

BC: So that makes it seem a little easier.

(Applause)

Writing is not actually as easy as that for me.

But I like to pretend that it comes with ease.

One of my students came up after class, an introductory class,

and she said, "You know, poetry is harder than writing,"

which I found both erroneous and profound.

(Laughter)

So I like to at least pretend it just flows out.

A friend of mine has a slogan; he's another poet.

He says that, "If at first you don't succeed,

hide all evidence you ever tried."

(Laughter)

The next poem is also rather short.

Poetry just says a few things in different ways.

And I think you could boil this poem down to saying,

"Some days you eat the bear, other days the bear eats you."

And it uses the imagery

of dollhouse furniture.

(Video) Narration: "Some Days."

Some days

I put the people in their places at the table,

bend their legs at the knees,

if they come with that feature,

and fix them into the tiny wooden chairs.

All afternoon they face one another,

the man in the brown suit,

the woman in the blue dress --

perfectly motionless, perfectly behaved.

But other days I am the one

who is lifted up by the ribs

then lowered into the dining room of a dollhouse

to sit with the others at the long table.

Very funny.

But how would you like it

if you never knew from one day to the next

if you were going to spend it

striding around like a vivid god,

your shoulders in the clouds,

or sitting down there

amidst the wallpaper

staring straight ahead

with your little plastic face?

(Applause)

BC: There's a horror movie in there somewhere.

The next poem is called forgetfulness,

and it's really just a kind of poetic essay

on the subject of mental slippage.

And the poem begins

with a certain species of forgetfulness

that someone called

literary amnesia,

in other words, forgetting the things that you have read.

(Video) Narration: "Forgetfulness."

The name of the author is the first to go,

followed obediently

by the title, the plot,

the heartbreaking conclusion,

the entire novel,

which suddenly becomes one you have never read,

never even heard of.

It is as if, one by one,

the memories you used to harbor

decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain

to a little fishing village

where there are no phones.

Long ago,

you kissed the names of the nine muses good-bye

and you watched the quadratic equation

pack its bag.

And even now,

as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away,

a state flower perhaps,

the address of an uncle,

the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is

you are struggling to remember,

it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,

not even lurking

in some obscure corner

of your spleen.

It has floated away

down a dark mythological river

whose name begins with an L

as far as you can recall,

well on your own way to oblivion

where you will join those

who have forgotten even how to swim

and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night

to look up the date of a famous battle

in a book on war.

No wonder the Moon in the window

seems to have drifted out of a love poem

that you used to know by heart.

(Applause)

BC: The next poem is called "The Country"

and it's based on,

when I was in college

I met a classmate who remains to be a friend of mine.

He lived, and still does, in rural Vermont.

I lived in New York City.

And we would visit each other.

And when I would go up to the country,

he would teach me things like deer hunting,

which meant getting lost with a gun basically --

(Laughter)

and trout fishing and stuff like that.

And then he'd come down to New York City

and I'd teach him what I knew,

which was largely smoking and drinking.

(Laughter)

And in that way we traded lore with each other.

The poem that's coming up

is based on him trying to tell me a little something

about a domestic point of etiquette

in country living

that I had a very hard time, at first, processing.

It's called "The Country."

(Video) Narration: "The Country."

I wondered about you

when you told me never to leave

a box of wooden strike-anywhere matches

just lying around the house,

because the mice might get into them

and start a fire.

But your face was absolutely straight

when you twisted the lid down

on the round tin

where the matches, you said, are always stowed.

Who could sleep that night?

Who could whisk away the thought

of the one unlikely mouse

padding along a cold water pipe

behind the floral wallpaper,

gripping a single wooden match

between the needles of his teeth?

Who could not see him rounding a corner,

the blue tip scratching against rough-hewn beam,

the sudden flare

and the creature, for one bright, shining moment,

suddenly thrust ahead of his time --

now a fire-starter,

now a torch-bearer

in a forgotten ritual,

little brown druid

illuminating some ancient night?

And who could fail to notice,

lit up in the blazing insulation,

the tiny looks of wonderment

on the faces of his fellow mice --

one-time inhabitants

of what once was your house in the country?

(Applause)

BC: Thank you.

(Applause)

Thank you. And the last poem is called "The Dead."

I wrote this after a friend's funeral,

but not so much about the friend as something the eulogist kept saying,

as all eulogists tend to do,

which is how happy the deceased would be

to look down and see all of us assembled.

And that to me was a bad start to the afterlife,

having to witness your own funeral and feel gratified.

So the little poem is called "The Dead."

(Video) Narration: "The Dead."

The dead are always looking down on us,

they say.

While we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,

they are looking down

through the glass-bottom boats of heaven

as they row themselves slowly

through eternity.

They watch the tops of our heads

moving below on Earth.

And when we lie down

in a field or on a couch,

drugged perhaps

by the hum of a warm afternoon,

they think we are looking back at them,

which makes them lift their oars

and fall silent

and wait like parents

for us to close our eyes.

(Applause)

BC: I'm not sure if other poems will be animated.

It took a long time --

I mean, it's rather uncommon to have this marriage --

a long time to put those two together.

But then again, it took us a long time

to put the wheel and the suitcase together.

(Laughter)

I mean, we had the wheel for some time.

And schlepping is an ancient and honorable art.

(Laughter)

I just have time

to read a more recent poem to you.

If it has a subject,

the subject is adolescence.

And it's addressed to a certain person.

It's called "To My Favorite 17-Year-Old High School Girl."

"Do you realize that if you had started building the Parthenon

on the day you were born,

you would be all done in only one more year?

Of course, you couldn't have done that all alone.

So never mind;

you're fine just being yourself.

You're loved for just being you.

But did you know that at your age

Judy Garland was pulling down 150,000 dollars a picture,

Joan of Arc was leading the French army to victory

and Blaise Pascal had cleaned up his room --

no wait, I mean he had invented the calculator?

Of course, there will be time for all that

later in your life,

after you come out of your room

and begin to blossom,

or at least pick up all your socks.

For some reason I keep remembering

that Lady Jane Grey was queen of England

when she was only 15.

But then she was beheaded, so never mind her as a role model.

(Laughter)

A few centuries later,

when he was your age,

Franz Schubert was doing the dishes for his family,

but that did not keep him

from composing two symphonies, four operas

and two complete masses as a youngster.

(Laughter)

But of course, that was in Austria

at the height of Romantic lyricism,

not here in the suburbs of Cleveland.

(Laughter)

Frankly, who cares

if Annie Oakley was a crack shot at 15

or if Maria Callas debuted as Tosca at 17?

We think you're special just being you --

playing with your food and staring into space.

(Laughter)

By the way,

I lied about Schubert doing the dishes,

but that doesn't mean he never helped out around the house."

(Laughter)

(Applause)

Thank you. Thank you.

(Applause)

Thanks.

(Applause)