OK,
so if your poems start that way and someone like James Tate has a more bombastic
beginning, why do you think that is? Is that a poet's personality shaping their
body of work?
That
is a very good question. If you look at the beginnings of poets' poems, every
poet is in the habit of making a different set of demands on the reader. I love
James Tate's work. His more recent work is a strangely folksy, storytelling
work where it's very easy to follow in the beginning because he seems to be
telling a story around the cracker-barrel. But it takes place in a town that
is extremely eccentric. I suppose it's just a matter of how you address the
reader. Do you jump in? Do you start in the middle of things? Or, like me, do
you try to back the poem up and talk about how the poem came into being?
Gene Myers Interviews Billy Collins