Billy Collins Poetry Animated

Billy Collins, former US Poet Laureate and one of America's best-selling poets, is not big on technology. As far as I know (based on a conversation way back in 2007), he was not big on using email or computers. But he recognizes the power of the web in promoting poetry. He has been doing a poetry podcast on Facebook that started in the Pandemic Times. His Poetry 180 project while he was Laureate is available online and in book form (including a sequel). 

Back when we had that 2007 conversation, there were 11 short animated films set to Billy reading his poems. There's not much information online about them. They are produced by JWT-NY. You can watch most of them on YouTube. I have embedded a few here to sample.

Here's an interpretation of Billy's poem "Forgetfulness" with animation by Julian Grey/Head Gear.

   

 "Budapest" is also animated by Julian Grey/Head Gear.

 

"Now and Then" is animated by Eun-ha Paek of Milky Elephant.

  

More People Are Reading Poetry

I like finding surveys that say that more people are reading poetry. 28 million American adults read poetry this year according to a survey of arts participation conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the U.S. Census Bureau. That is the highest percentage of poetry readership in more than 15 years.

“We’ve never seen an increase in poetry reading. If anything there had been a decline — a pretty sharp decline — since about 2002 at least,” said Sunil Iyengar, NEA director of research and analysis."

The full arts participation report won’t be released until later this year, but they thought the results were too significant not to share early.

Young adults and certain racial ethnic groups account for a large portion of the increase. U.S. poetry readers aged 18 to 24 more than doubled, jumping from 8 percent in 2012 to 17 percent in 2017. Among people of color, African Americans and Asian Americans are reading poetry at the highest rates — which more than doubled in the last five years — up 15 and 12 percent, respectively.

Other notable increased readership groups include women, rural Americans and those with only some college education.

This kind of data is of interest to the NEA’s mission of increasing participation in the arts, and they have found in other studies how reading tends to be a portal to other types of participation and other types of engagement, in the arts and outside the arts.

Reading Poetry Like a Professor

I had Billy Collin's warning about some classes in "Introduction to Poetry" when I encountered an article titled "How to read poetry like a professor."

It turns out that the author of the piece, Thomas Foster, is a retired professor of literature who has made a side career by writing instructive books about how we ought to read. (He's not the old professor illustrated above.)

He has published How to Read Literature Like a Professor, How to Read Novels Like a Professor, Twenty-five Books that Shaped America, Reading the Silver Screen and now How to Read Poetry Like a Professor.

Foster, like many of us, couldn't quite get a "handle” on poetry in elementary school. But, as a teenager, he encountered with the poems of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and it turned around how he read poems.

Billy Collins shares that Ferlinghetti connection. In Collins' poem "The Trouble with Poetry," he says that reading poetry makes him want to write poetry and fills him with a "longing to steal."

And what an unmerry band of thieves we are,
cut-purses, common shoplifters,
I thought to myself
as a cold wave swirled around my feet
and the lighthouse moved its megaphone over the sea,
which is an image I stole directly
from Lawrence Ferlinghetti --
to be perfectly honest for a moment --

the bicycling poet of San Francisco
whose little amusement park of a book
I carried in a side pocket of my uniform
up and down the treacherous halls of high school.

Foster's article is taken from his latest how-to-read book which, thankfully, does not suggest (as Collins warned):

tie the poem to a chair with rope 
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Foster's suggestions include some good basic advice:

• Read what’s actually in front of you. Make a quite literal first reading.
• Read all the words. Each word. No skimming. He feels students often whiz past a keyword.
• On a second reading, get into the way things are assembled on the page. He advises to read the sentences, not the lines. That means you should also 
• obey all punctuation, including its absence. No punctuation at the end of the line? Keep that very brief pause but don't drop the voice as if the sentence is over. A comma, acts as all commas - pause - and a period, semicolon, a question mark and even a dash is meant as a stop.
• I agree with him that at least one time you should read the poem aloud. This may not work in the library or coffee shop, but when alone or with an open group, do so. Even poems  "written for the page" reveal things when heard. That's one reason why I like audiobooks.
• Do multiple readings of the poem. Unlike reading a novel, it is easy and to reread a poem right after the first cold reading.
• Look up the odd words or allusions. Some poetry, especially the older classics, contain references and vocabulary that was challenging back in their own time for the less educated and is challenging today for even the educated. Even the more accessible modern poetry sometimes makes reference to a person or place that would be helpful to know a bit more about to understand the poem fully.

I am not so sure that this is so much how to read "like a professor" as much as it is simply how to read a poem. But it is instructive in correcting some of the ways that some students might misread a poem.




Painting via Wikimedia & the Brooklyn Museum of Professor William H. Goodyear by Wilford S. Conrow

Americans Are Still Reading Print Books

          

Print books remain the most popular format for reading, with 67% of Americans having read a print book in the past year. That comes from a Pew Research Center survey conducted in January. I think it is a good thing that 74% of Americans have read a book in the past 12 months in any format. That percent has been stable since 2012, but Americans are also spreading their book consumption across several formats.

Despite all the buzz about everything going digital, relatively few Americans consume digital books (which include audiobooks and e-books) to the exclusion of print.

The print-only people are at 39%. 29% read in digital formats and also read print books. But those reading only digital formats and that have not read any print books in the past 12 months is a measly 7%. The use of audiobooks is rising - now up to 18% of those surveyed.

Hermann Hesse on Books and Reading

Books and reading don't always get a lot of respect and attention these days.

German-born Swiss writer and painter Hermann Hesse wrote an essay titled “The Magic of the Book” in 1930 that is a reminder about why we love to read books and how important that simple act can be.

The essay is in his posthumously published My Belief: Essays on Life and Art.

Among the many worlds that man did not receive as a gift from nature but created out of his own mind, the world of books is the greatest… Without the word, without the writing of books, there is no history, there is no concept of humanity. And if anyone wants to try to enclose in a small space, in a single house or a single room, the history of the human spirit and to make it his own, he can only do this in the form of a collection of books...

We need not fear a future elimination of the book. On the contrary, the more that certain needs for entertainment and education are satisfied through other inventions, the more the book will win back in dignity and authority. For even the most childish intoxication with progress will soon be forced to recognize that writing and books have a function that is eternal. It will become evident that formulation in words and the handing on of these formulations through writing are not only important aids but actually the only means by which humanity can have a history and a continuing consciousness of itself...

The great and mysterious thing about this reading experience is this: the more discriminatingly, the more sensitively, and the more associatively we learn to read, the more clearly we see every thought and every poem in its uniqueness, its individuality, in its precise limitations and see that all beauty, all charm depend on this individuality and uniqueness — at the same time we come to realize ever more clearly how all these hundred thousand voices of nations strive toward the same goals, call upon the same gods by different names, dream the same wishes, suffer the same sorrows. Out of the thousandfold fabric of countless languages and books of several thousand years, in ecstatic instants there stares at the reader a marvelously noble and transcendent chimera: the countenance of humanity, charmed into unity from a thousand contradictory features.

Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) was born in Germany and later became a citizen of Switzerland. As a Western man profoundly affected by the mysticism of Eastern thought, he wrote many novels, stories, and essays that bear a vital spiritual force that has captured the imagination and loyalty of many generations of readers. In 1946, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature for The Glass Bead Game.

Book Launch for The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop

Book Launch for The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop

Sunday, November 10, 2013

2 PM

Join Diane Lockward and 20 poets featured in the book for a book launch reading for The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop at the West Caldwell Public Library (30 Clinton Road, West Caldwell, NJ)

. . . this is a poetry exercise/craft tip book poets (and English instructors) only dream about, a collection divided into sections such as "Sound," "Voice," and "Syntax," each addressing the stated topic with relevant writing/revision suggestions, plus a poem provided as a springboard for writing a poem in a similar mode or form. There are even examples of poems written from the prompt. . . I look forward to the next time I teach introduction to poetry writing because I definitely think students will appreciate the specificity of Lockward's prompts.
Martha Silano, Blue Positive

Diane Lockward is the author of three poetry books, most recently, Temptation by Water. Her poems have been included in such anthologies as Poetry Daily: 360 Poems from the World's Most Popular Poetry Website and Garrison Keillor's Good Poems for Hard Times, and have been published in such journals as Harvard Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Prairie Schooner. 

The book conatins model poems with prompts, writing tips, and interviews contributed by 56 of our nation's finest poets, including 13 former and current state Poets Laureate: Kim Addonizio, JoAnn Balingit, Ellen Bass, Jan Beatty, Jeanne Marie Beaumont, Robert Bense, Pam Bernard, Michelle Bitting, Deborah Bogen, Kathryn Stripling Byer, Edward Byrne, Kelly Cherry, Philip F. Deaver, Bruce Dethlefsen, Caitlin Doyle, Patricia Fargnoli, Ann Fisher-Wirth, Amy Gerstler, Karin Gottshall, Jennifer Gresham, Bruce Guernsey, Marilyn Hacker, Jeffrey Harrison, Lola Haskins, Jane Hirshfield, Gray Jacobik, Rod Jellema, Richard Jones, Julie Kane, Adele Kenny, Dorianne Laux, Sydney Lea, Hailey Leithauser, Jeffrey Levine, Diane Lockward, Denise Low, Jennifer Maier, Marie-Elizabeth Mali, Jeffrey McDaniel, Wesley McNair, Susan Laughter Meyers, Bronwen Butter Newcott, Alicia Ostriker, Linda Pastan, Stanley Plumly, Vern Rutsala, Martha Silano, Marilyn L. Taylor, Matthew Thorburn, Lee Upton, Nance Van Winckel, Ingrid Wendt, Nancy White, Cecilia Woloch, Baron Wormser, Suzanne Zweizig

And an additional 45 accomplished poets whose poems inspired by the prompts in the book serve as samples: Joel Allegretti, Linda Benninghoff, Broeck Blumberg, Rose Mary Boehm, Bob Bradshaw, Kelly Cressio-Moeller, Rachel Dacus, Ann DeVenezia, Liz Dolan, Kristina England, Laura Freedgood, Gail Fishman Gerwin, Erica Goss, Jeanie Greensfelder, Constance Hanstedt, John Hutchinson, Penny Harter, Wendy Elizabeth Ingersoll, Tina Kelley, Claire Keyes, Laurie Kolp, Joan Mazza, Janet McCann, Antoinette Libro, Charlotte Mandel, Joan Mazza, Janet McCann, Nancy Bailey Miller, Thomas Moudry, Drew Myron, Shawnte Orion, Donna Pflueger, Wanda Praisner, Susanna Rich, Ken Ronkowitz, Basil Rouskas, Nancy Scott, Martha Silano, Linda Simone, Melissa Studdard, Lisken Van Pelt Dus, Jeanne Wagner, Ingrid Wendt, Scott Wiggerman, Bill Wunder, Michael T. Young, Sander Zulauf

Are You Still Reading Magazines?

Seeing the reports that Newsweek will end its print edition (a digital version will still be done) resurrected the long-running larger story about whether or not print publications will exist in the future.

I am pretty confident that print books will survive for some time (though less will be published) but I have no hope for newspapers and little hope for magazines.

I went to Amazon to check prices on the magazines for poets and writers that I have subscribed to at some point. Of the ones below, I only subscribe to two currently (as print editions) and every time I get a renewal mail, I wonder if I should continue. Part of my hesitation is in questioning whether or not the magazine will make it another year. Subscribe for 3 years? That's a bad bet.

And there are plenty of small press poetry publications that need subscribers to survive. Even libraries and schools are trimming their periodicals subscriptions - or switching to digital (editions or databases).

And the cost of print editions (especially for magazine with little or no advertising) is quite high. Unfortunately, print editions are not that much cheaper - and many readers expected that they would be significantly lower.  Although digital brings down the production cost, the cost of staff, office space and other budget lines is fixed.

I would be curious to hear your answers (via the comments below) to these questions.

1. Are you currently reading poetry and writing magazines?
2. Are you reading print or digital editions?
3. Would you be more or less willing to read them as digital versions?
4. Do you still subscribe to these publications?

Of course, publishers also want to know these answers...

Are there any summer poetry beach reads?

I was reading one of the many summer reading articles that appear every year - What to Read at the Beach, or: Get Your Red-Hot Summer Trash Right Here! on NYTimes.com and wondered if there are any poetry titles that you would take to the beach.

The summer book list is often filled with guilty pleasures - books that we want to read but are more fiction than literature - and for some authors, making a beach book list might be an insult.

I have reread Moby-Dick several times over a summer, but I don't think it makes the beach list for many people, even though it has lots of ocean in it.

The idea of poetry beach reading came up last month in a conversation I had with poet Maria Mazziotti Gillan. She had given me an advance copy of her newest collection of poems, The Place I Call Home to take on a trip to Aruba.

I said, "This isn't really beach reading" but Maria insisted it was, and that I could read it "right through, like a novel."

I tend to read books of poetry poem by poem, not in order, and sometimes choosing ones to read by titles. Reading the book all the way through seems to me like eating a whole bag of chips. "I eat a whole bag of chips," Maria told me.

So, I did. I read her book cover to cover in one beach day. And it worked. I suspect that I was the only person reading a book of poetry on that beach.

How do you read books of poetry?

Are there any books of poetry that you would put on a summer reading list or take to the pool or beach?

Celebrating Elvis Presley's Birthday in Poetry and Song

Elvis reading

Expressing Elvis: Celebrating Elvis Presley's Birthday in Poetry and Song is an event in Ridgewood, NJ on January 8, 2011.

"Elvis Presley is Alive and Well on Lincoln Avenue in Fair Lawn, New Jersey...." So reads the title of a poem by Maria Mazziotti Gillan.

On that same road but a little farther north -- in Ridgewood -- Elvis will be coming back. He will be alive and well -- in poetry and song.

It seems like every poet has an Elvis poem or two. In honor of Elvis Presley's birthday, join poets Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Laura Boss, James Gwyn, and others as they share their Elvis poems.

January 8, 2011, from 1-4 pm at Ridgewood Christian Reformed Church, 271 Lincoln Avenue, Ridgewood, NJ. Plenty of free parking. A large space to accommodate all manner of bards and balladeers. Express Elvis in verse or in any variety of expression. Come on out to listen or to participate. Tune up your guitar. Dust off your jumpsuit. It will be a memorable afternoon. It's free. All are welcome.

Note to Poets: If you'd like to participate, please submit your intent to James Gwyn at ERGO.therefore@gmail.com by Dec. 31st so he can get a reading list together. RSVP

Note to Singers: Acoustic, please. There are some mics, but best to bring your own. RSVP

Poet Phillip Schultz Reading in NJ

Philip Schultz   photo by Monica Banks

The Warren County Community College Visiting Authors Series continues this Wednesday, October 13th, with a reading by Philip Schultz, recipient of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

The event is free and open to the public.

It will be held in Room 123 at WCCC and will begin at 7:00 p.m. The WCCC Chapter of Phi Theta Kappa, the international honor society for two-year colleges, will provide complimentary refreshments.

One of American poetry's longtime masters of the art, Philip Schultz is the founder/director of The Writers Studio, a private school for fiction and poetry writing based in New York City. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Failure (Harcourt 2007), winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. His other collections include The God of Loneliness: New and Selected Poems (2010), Living in the Past (2004), and The Holy Worm of Praise (2002), all published by Harcourt. He is also the author of Deep Within the Ravine (Viking 1984), recipient of The Academy of American Poets Lamont Prize; Like Wings (Viking 1978), winner of an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award as well as a National Book Award nomination; and the poetry chapbook, My Guardian Angel Stein (1986).

He lives in East Hampton, New York, with his wife, sculptor Monica Banks, and their two sons, Elias and August.


The WCCC Visiting Authors Series is supported by a grant from the Warren County Cultural and Heritage Commission. All facilities comply with ADA regulations and are fully accessible.

After Mr. Schultz’s reading, there will be a brief Q & A with the audience and a book signing. Books will be available for purchase at the event.

For directions to the college or to find out about WCCC’s Creative Writing degree program, please call (908) 835-9222 or visit www.warren.edu.

T.S. Eliot Reading "The Waste Land"

T.S. Eliot reading "The Waste Land." Nothing much visually, but interesting to hear the poet reading.

It has been called "one of the most important poems of the 20th century."



The title alludes to the wounding of the Fisher King and the subsequent sterility of his lands.

• "The Waste Land" on Bartleby.com
• Exploring the poem
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_waste_land 

Visiting Authors Series

Fall 2008 Visiting Authors Series at Warren County Community College (NJ)

• Wednesday, September 17: Baron Wormser, former Poet Laureate of Maine and author of the just-released Scattered Chapters: New and Selected Poems (Sarabande Books)
• Thursday, October 16: Mimi Schwartz, author of the new memoir, Good Neighbors, Bad Times - Echoes of My Father's German Village (University of Nebraska Press)
• Thursday, November 13: Francine Prose, novelist and essayist, author of the forthcoming Goldengrove (HarperCollins—September 2008) and Blue Angel (Harper Perennial), a finalist for the National Book Award
• NOTE: Baron Wormser and Francine Prose will each teach a master class, from 4 to 5 p.m., on the day of their respective readings. Enrollment in each master class is free and open to the public, but pre-registration is required. To register for the master class, please call B.J. Ward at (908) 835-2531. High school students are welcome.

All events are free and open to the public, thanks to a grant from the Warren County Cultural and Heritage Commission. The readings will be held in Room 123 and begin at 7:30 p.m.


For directions to the college, go to http://www.warren.edu/

Billy Collins Live

Billy Collins, former U.S. Poet Laureate, shares an evening of his poetry in a benefit reading for WNYC, New York Public Radio. Often compared to Robert Frost, his poetry has been embraced by people of all ages and backgrounds, and his readings are most often standing room only.

On this audio CD, Collins reads 24 of his poems, including "Dharma" --a spiritual yet humbling ode to man's best friend, "The Lanyard--an amusing recollection about the popular, if not pointless, summer camp pastime, and "Consolation" --a tongue-in-cheek reflection of a canceled European trip, and the benefits of staying home instead.

In addition to the poetry readings, Collins also spends some time in a brief question and answer session where he reflects on what makes good poetry, his own process of reaching his audiences as a poet, the success of his Poetry 180 programs in schools nationwide, and an amusing sidebar on his memories growing up as an only child.




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Wallace Stevens Audio Downloads

Just a brief post about some poems by Wallace Stevens which can be downloaded as podcasts (iTunes).

You can hear many of the most popular of his poems (Anecdote of the Jar, The Emperor of Ice Cream, Peter Quince at the Clavier, Sunday Morning, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird).

They were recorded for LibriVox by Alan Drake and all the poems are in the public domain.

And you may want to listen to another related podcast featuring the literary critic Harold Bloom from his Yale seminar on "The Art of Reading a Poem" (listen in iTunes or get the mp3). Bloom is walking students through his reading of Stevens' "Parts of a World."

Free Billy Collins!

No, Billy is not trapped or jailed.

It's his CD, The Best Cigarette. It's a great CD of him reading. There are 33 tracks that are now available for free. No more CDs available.

We gave Billy some grief here about his expensive little haiku book, but then he goes and gives us this freebie.

This work is now licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. That means you can download, share these, burn these, give these away for non-commercial purposes - you just can't make money from your efforts. Hurray for open culture! (Geek Talk: All mp3 files on these sites are at least 192 kbps)

Go to Internet Archive http://www.archive.org/details/BillyCollinsTheBestCigarette and download the whole album or get the tracks selectively one by one.

It's also available track by track at http://music.download.com/billycollins

Both sites will also lead you to some other great free downloads.

You can download, share these, burn these, give these for non-commerical puposes (you can't make money off it).