His delivery was straight. His baritone never changed in cadence and he looked so average that he could be passed on the street and never noticed.
But when he finished his University Convocation speech in McArthur Court on Sunday, the thousands gathered just to hear him speak roared in applause.
Billy Collins, the former U.S. Poet Laureate, was introduced by University President Dave Frohnmayer as a man who “understands things deeper than the eyes… with his profound observations on everyday life.”
During his presentation, Collins addressed the typical stereotypes of poetry and challenged the crowd with the definition of a good reader, which he said is someone who writes in the margins of their books.
Margins exist “as a dialogue between you and the writer,” he said.
Poetry originated as little descriptions that monks would write in the margins of the Bible that would later become “the first personal poetry,” he said.
Responding to the text, becoming involved in it, he said, is destroyed by the yellow highlighter.
“Highlighters only allow a monotonous interpretation of the book,” he said, “leaving behind a snottish residue.”
“Mark up your books and leave your footprint,” he said, “put down your highlighter and pick up those number two pencils.”
Throughout his speech, Collins read various poems from his collection “Sailing Alone Around the Room,” offering personal accounts and reasoning behind the writing.
In introducing “The Trouble with Poetry,” he said poetry “compares everything in the world to everything else in the world. Poems are about other poems, and novels are about other novels.”
A solution to this problem, he said, was to take two lines from someone else’s poem, and “rewrite it, out of professional courtesy,” as was the case with “Litany,” a poem originally written by Jacques Crickillon.
“I thought the original poem was outdated. (His reasoning was) women didn’t want love, they didn’t want affection, they didn’t want loyalty. They wanted similes.”
Perhaps what Collins is most known for is taking simple topics and developing them into complex stories, while keeping them accessible to everyday readers, as is the case with his poems “The Lanyard” and “The Death of the Hat.”
In “The Lanyard,” he writes about how, as a kid, he’d given his mother a lanyard he’d made at summer camp, an insignificant gift compared with all his mother had given him.
The poem reads, “Here are thousands of meals, she said/and here is clothing and a good education/And here is your lanyard, I replied/which I made with a little help from a counselor.”