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.

Artist David Sibley Discusses Bright Wings Illustrations

Thursday, March 04 9:15 am

Artist David Allen Sibley 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.

Are you, and have you always been, a bird watcher?

Yes, I guess so – at least as long as I can remember. I started keeping a bird list when I was seven, but I had started drawing birds a few years before that as soon as I could draw. My father’s an ornithologist, so the house was filled with books about birds, and I used to trace and copy pictures out of those books. Then on weekends I remember going out on hikes and picnics, and having my father and his friends pointing out birds, snakes, insects, and everything else. I was interested in all of it but birds quickly became my primary interest and have always held a special place.

Do you sketch from live models, or do you have another method of illustrating?

I sketch live birds in the wild as much as possible. I spend a lot of time out with binoculars and telescope, just watching, and I manage to get some snippets of that on paper and use those experiences as inspiration. I think my time in the field is the most important element of any painting, and my goal is always to try to paint what the bird looks like through binoculars, the way a birder would see it. Once I’m back in my studio I pull out all of my field sketches and notes, and collections of photographs, and choose the pose I want to show.

Is there a species that is particularly challenging to capture?

One of the most difficult groups for me to draw has always been the herons and egrets. They look so elegant and graceful at a distance, but the closer you get the more angular, bony, prehistoric and almost grotesque they look. So to do a drawing that “looks right” you have to take the close-up details and smooth them into the elegant lines you would see at a distance, but it’s not real, it’s a blend. Just drawing the shapes is challenging enough, but finding the right blend of details and impressions is even more difficult.

How do illustrations work with the poems in Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds?

I’ve always been fascinated by how pictures and words work together, and that interaction is a really important part of how my books are structured. Poetry can evoke such strong feelings and images in our minds, it would be easy for a painting to conflict with that, in the same way that we recoil when the hero in a movie doesn’t look the way we pictured them from the book. My illustrations in this book are without much of a narrative and leave out lots of details that the viewer can fill in. They’re just portraits of the birds, so hopefully the reader can easily merge the image with the story being told in the poem. I think this works much better than if I had tried to “interpret” the poem and paint my personal vision of the poet’s work.