Versed in poetry

Mice incinerating a house. Disgruntled house pets visiting from beyond the grave. Even the tried-and-true tactic of honoring women via the simile.

All of these were part of former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins’ reading Tuesday to a sold-out crowd in the Great Hall of the Student Union.

Collins entertained and touched the crowd with 24 poems in the course of an hour.

Some were comfortably funny depictions of everyday activities. Some caused the crowd to take pause at the powerful last verse, the “oh” audible throughout the room.

Either way, Collins read them in a paced and deliberate demeanor, and his perfectly dry delivery sounded eerily similar to that of actor Kevin Spacey.

In the poem “The Trouble with Poetry,” Collins slyly remarked that the trouble with poetry, in fact, “… is that it encourages the writing of more poetry.”

In “Litany,” he joked about how women are compared too often to the many wonders of the world through similes and are probably “sick of them.”

“Dharma,” a poem about Collins’ faithful companion, briefly explored the noble yet carefree life of his dog.

The dog “provides a finer example of a life without encumbrance,” he read, and then compared his pet to both Thoreau and Gandhi.

Collins stuck with the canine theme in “The Revenant,” a quirky work about a dog that has been put to sleep and that returns to tell his owner he never liked him.

“Sorry, cat people — it turns out that you are the hacks in the afterlife,” he said after the poem.

Throughout the reading, Collins shifted from more light and humorous topics to those that were more somber, such as death, mortality and silence.

“Building With Its Face Blown Off” explored the vulnerability of a room after a wall has been ripped away by a violent explosion. Collins prefaced the work by noting that it was the type of photo he’s seen too often in his lifetime.

“The Country” focused on perspectives of city life and life in the country. Collins read about laying awake at night, imagining a mouse igniting a “strike anywhere” match while crawling through a pipe — and subsequently torching a country house.

Collins, who has been praised for his accessible but universally affecting poetry, held the title of national poet laureate from 2001 to 2003.

Before concluding with his poem “Japan,” Collins told the audience that he recently received a check in the mail for $25 from the magazine Modern Haiku. He joked that he won the “Cool Haiku of the Month” award and then said the check broke down into $1.47 a syllable, “which is actually an extremely high rate of pay for any writer.”

Scott Dill, a high school English teacher, said he enjoyed the reading. “It was great; it was exactly what I expected,” Dill said. “I’m a fan of his work, and it’s great to see a personality behind that.”

 

Contact the A&E Editor at artsdesk@unc.edu.