Poet Laureate Billy Collins Discusses Bright Wings

Monday, March 08 3:52 pm

Poet Laureate Billy Collins will be a featured speaker at Art/Sci Collision: Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds at the Museum on March 10.  He recently answered some questions about his contribution to the anthology.  Make sure to read another Q&A with his collaborator and the anthology’s illustrator, David Allen Sibley.

How did the idea for Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds come about?

I was approached by Columbia University Press and asked if I would be interested in editing an anthology of bird poems. It struck me as a worthwhile enterprise, but I knew that there were a number of such collections already in print. However, when I was told that the book would be illustrated by David Sibley, I jumped at the chance. Sibley’s Guide to Birds has long been one of my favorite reference books. I knew that with Sibley’s gorgeous pictures, the anthology would be unique.

There are more than 100 poems in this anthology. Do you have a favorite, or one that resonates with you more than most?

Favoritism is not permitted among editors. I may have secret favorites, but more in my focus is the anthology as a whole which features a balance of contemporary free verse (for lack or a better term) and 19th century formal poems. The second most striking feature of the book (second to Sibley’s paintings) is that each poem is species-specific.  I was not free to include any poems about “birds” in general; searching for poems about individual species—the dove, the storm-petrel, the crow—made my work harder but more rewarding in the end.

As a group, birds seem to inspire more poets than do mammals, say. Is there something particularly poetic about birds? Flight?

I tried to simplify the appeal of birds to poets in the book’s introduction by saying that they do two things that poets long to do: sing and fly. And sometimes they perform these natural miracles simultaneously!  Another reason might be the amazing variety of bird species, ranging from the hummingbird to the sand hill crane. Birds offer an immense spectrum of types, certainly compared to the wolf, say, or the rhino.

Some species, such as swallows and owls, seem to have been a popular subject for poets for millennia. Why do you think that is?

Swallows perhaps because of their aerial acrobatics, which are especially impressive to behold when you stop to realize that as they are gliding this way and that, they are eating 100’s of mosquitoes.  The owl?  Most mysterious of birds.  No bird returns the human gaze with such intensity.  But the listener must be careful not to confuse its hoot with the moaning of the mourning dove.

You decided to leave some classics, including Edgar Allan Poe’s “Raven,” on the cutting-room floor. Why?

Standard bird poems such as “The Raven” and “Ode to a Nightingale” have been anthologized to death. For the sake of surprise, I wanted to avoid such easy choices and leave room for some newer, contemporary voices

You write about the “usefulness” of poetry. What is poetry’s purpose?

To distinguish the poet from other people.