Billy Collins brings a little Love to KC

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No other cultural figure’s arc traces the particular vectors that poet Billy Collins has charted. At 73, he straddles multiple media eras: He used to seal short poems inside envelopes and mail them to Rolling Stone magazine, which published them among its reviews of vinyl albums; in 2012, he joined the ranks of TED talkers. In between, of course, the many books and the two terms as U.S. poet laureate. Plenty of teaching. Plenty of golf. Zero detectable stuffiness.

That lack of pretension is the biggest reason that, even if you don’t read poetry, you’ve likely heard Collins’ name. And if you do read poetry, that same blissful avoidance of fuss is why you may have taken him for granted as too simple or too well-known.

Then again, maybe you resent him for reading your mind. Aimless Love, his latest collection, has just come out in paperback, and the assemblage of old and new poems reconfirms Collins’ mastery of the moment, of vectors particular to himself and particular to you, too. He once described his mission this way: “I use the pedestrian detail — the dog asleep on the floor, the bird out the window — to reverberate against the loftiness of literary tradition. … If one particular moment happens to be filled by a cherry tree in blossom and a sliver of a moon, then to merely mention those things … is to celebrate the fact that you exist, that you are the only creature in the universe who occupies these exact time-space coordinates.” Well, mission accomplished. Again.

Ahead of Collins’ reading this week (7 p.m. Thursday, October 30, at Unity Temple on the Plaza), The Pitch asked him a few questions by e-mail.

The Pitch: I’m probably not alone in looking to prize lists to find new poets to read, but it also makes me feel lazy. What do prizes say to us about poetry right now, and where should we look instead (or besides) to make personal discoveries?

Collins: You could flip through any number of anthologies of contemporary poets looking for ones you like. Check the acknowledgments in a book by a poet you already like and subscribe to a couple of the magazines where he or she likes to publish.

Who are you reading these days, in and out of the poetry realm?

I just read four books on the Beatles and Paul McCartney because I interviewed him last week and thought I should know all about him before I asked him questions.

I like the sly way that your “If This Were a Job I’d Be Fired” gets to a byproduct of Charles Simic’s work: He makes one want to put on sweatpants and give up for a little while. Except that you end up with five quatrains after all. I feel like there are other moments in the new poems when you end with a kind of walking out the door for a bit. How has your working routine — your working life, really — changed over time?

I believe in solvitur ambulando — “It is solved by walking.” Wordsworth composed many of his poems on walks. Yet part of me likes the urbane Max Beerbohm who claimed that he had never actually gone out for a walk.

I like your note to Dvorak, and you’re freshly McCartney-minded. What, if anything, do you listen to as you write or edit? And if silence rules then, what do you play when you’re off the poetry clock?

I’ve written a few poems about what is playing in the background when I’m trying to write. Having nothing to say encourages me to write about what I’m listening to.

What do you think of now as semi-foolproof poems of love (among your own or the works of others)?

I’ve written only one foolproof poem. It’s titled “Japan.” All the rest are attempts.