Amna Nawaz:
It’s been said that nobody can fully understand the meaning of love unless they have had a dog.
Billy Collins agrees. The former U.S. poet laureate is a literary lion of the New York Public Library and member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He recently released his 12th volume of poetry called “Dog Show.”
Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown spent time in New York City with Collins and with dogs to explore this enduring relationship and how Collins translates it to the page. It’s part of our arts and culture series, Canvas.
Billy Collins, Poet, “Dog Show”: There’s one.
Hey, buddy. Hey, what’s going on?
Jeffrey Brown:
Billy Collins, a dog lover and owner who’s been writing about them for decades, he’s now pulled together a selection of those poems in a volume he’s dedicated to 85 dogs, those of friends as well as his own.
Watercolor illustrations by Pamela Sztybel help show what’s beguiled Collins ever since he got his first dog as an only child.
All right, so you like this dog’s life?
(Laughter)
Billy Collins:
I do, yes, yes.
Jeffrey Brown:
Yes?
Billy Collins:
Dogs like to be out. When I’m writing, I’m part dog.
Jeffrey Brown:
When you’re writing, you are part dog?
We talked recently in New York at the American Kennel Club Museum of the Dog about why dogs have been such a compelling topic for him.
Billy Collins:
If you write long enough, you discover these obsessions that you might not have been aware of.
Jeffrey Brown:
Did it look like an obsession?
Billy Collins:
Well, it didn’t until I raked them together, until I went through all my poems and picked out the dog poems. Then it seemed like, wow, that’s a lot of dogs for one person.
Jeffrey Brown:
The young Collins only got a dog of his own after much cajoling of his parents, and his father’s reaction has stuck with him.
Billy Collins:
When we got a dog from the pound, my father said: “We’re going to get a dog, but, remember, we’re buying a heartache,” which was, the dog’s going to die before we will, which is a fact of dog and human life.
Somebody said, the only — dogs are flawless, except they die too soon.
Jeffrey Brown:
And this became a kind of theme in some of the poems, right?
Billy Collins:
Absolutely.
One of the things about a dog poem or a pet poem, could be a goldfish, is, you really have to avoid sentimentality. So…
Jeffrey Brown:
Which you want to avoid.
Billy Collins:
That’s what we’re trying to avoid, is the — bring up the violins and — but I do have that poem of — you know, I think, “A Dog on His Master.”
Jeffrey Brown:
Yes.
Billy Collins:
And so here the dog is quite aware of his own mortality and is wondering if the owner see — it reverses — if the owner shares that awareness.
“A Dog on His Master.”
“As young as I look, I’m growing older faster than he. Seven to one is the ratio they tend to say. Whatever the number, I will pass them one day and take the lead, the way I do on our walks in the woods. And if this ever manages to cross his mind, it would be the sweetest shadow I have ever cast on snow or grass.”
Jeffrey Brown:
It also goes to the relationship of, how much does the dog understand us or lead us?
Billy Collins:
Right.
And if we think of friendship, as I do, as a relationship without purpose, you don’t want anything from me, I don’t want anything from you, we’re just friends, and the only thing we really want is to spend some time together. That’s it in a pure friendship.
So many, many of the poems are just about odd features of dog life. One is about when people dress up dogs in a soldier’s coat or a lab coat or something. Another one is trying to talk to a dog in Paris and explain English idioms to the dog quite late at night.
And there’s a poem where I wonder why the dog gets up every once in a while and moves from this room to the next room.
Jeffrey Brown:
I know you’re asked all the time, like, what starts a poem? Now, do you start thinking I’m going to write a poem about a dog?
Billy Collins:
Yes, something about a dog that I want to write about, and I will have that much going into it.
There’s a there’s a poem called “Dharma” where I am investigating the dogs. I’m impressed by the dog’s lack of possessions, the fact that the dog doesn’t have any money or clothing or they seem — and that leads to thinking that they are kind of Buddhists. They’re free of these encumberments of money and jobs and all that the way.
“The dog trots out the front door every morning without a hat or an umbrella, without any money or the keys to her doghouse never fails to fill the saucer of my heart with milky admiration. Who provides a finer example of a life without encumbrance? Thoreau in his curtainless hut, with a single plate, a single spoon? Gandhi, with his staff and spectacles?
“Off she goes into the material world with nothing but her brown coat and her modest blue collar.”
Jeffrey Brown:
While endlessly intrigued by what dogs can tell us about the human condition, Collins has written on subjects of all kinds, including, when he was poet laureate, his poem for the nation entitled “The Names” honoring victims of 9/11.
Billy Collins:
“Yesterday, I lay awake in the palm of the night. A soft rain stole in, unhelped by any breeze, and when I saw the silver glaze on the windows, I started with A, with Ackerman, as it happened, then Baxter and Calabro, Davis and Eberling, names falling into place as droplets fell through the dark.”
Jeffrey Brown:
Your poetry in general has a kind of simplicity to it, a clarity to it, but a lot of craft goes into it.
Billy Collins:
I think the craft part comes from having taught English literature for many, many decades and having this kind of Rolodex of poetic stuff revolving and teaching semester after semester, Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, Hardy.
So the voice in my poems is very straightforward. It’s without guile and even kind of chummy with the reader. Someone said no line must sleep. Every line needs to be aware of the lines around it, as opposed to prose, where the sentences just drive forward. Poetry is a language that means more and sounds better than other written expressions.
Jeffrey Brown:
And there’s still a place for it, even in this…
Billy Collins:
Oh, absolutely.
Jeffrey Brown:
Yes?
Billy Collins:
There will always be a place for it, yes. It takes us into kind of extreme exercises of the imagination and gives us a new sense of how to look at the world and intensifies, I think, our sense of being in the world. It makes us take ourselves more seriously.
Jeffrey Brown:
Meanwhile, back in the dog park, the party went on.
Billy Collins:
It’s like a cocktail party. You will see people or dogs getting into different groups.
Jeffrey Brown:
Yes.
Billy Collins:
There’s some loudmouth barking bully. The little toy dogs are barking. I don’t know. It’s just — they’re socializing. They’re a social group, yes.
Jeffrey Brown:
So, you feel at home at the party?
Billy Collins:
Very much so. I’m not sure what my role is, except observer. I feel at home, yes. I’m glad to be invited.
Jeffrey Brown:
For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown in New York.
