Holy Cross Magazine Podcast
Billy Collins '63 was U.S. Poet Laureate in 2002 when Congress gave him what seemed like an impossible assignment: commemorate the nearly 3,000 victims of 9/11 in a poem. In the inaugural episode of the Holy Cross Magazine Podcast, Collins talks about why he balked at first and why he changed his mind, and details how he wrote the historic piece, "The Names." More on Collins and "The Names" Collins profile: “The Making of an American Poet" Holy Cross Magazine, Summer 2020 Collins' website Collins' Facebook page, home of his live broadcasts Collins' "The Names" notebooks and drafts The Paris Review Interview with George Plimpton, Fall 2001 Podcast interview with Cheryl Strayed, May 2020 Holy Cross Remembers Lost Alumni on Anniversary of Sept. 11, September 2016 Transcript of this episode: Melissa Shaw: Hello and welcome to the Holy Cross Magazine Podcast. I'm your host Melissa Shaw, Editor of Holy Cross Magazine. This podcast takes a deeper dive into stories covered in our latest quarterly issue or examines a timely topic in between publication. In this episode, we'll be focusing on the latter with the man the New York Times has called the most popular poet in America, Billy Collins, class of 1963. Collins was serving as Poet Laureate of the United States on September 11th, 2001, and was later asked by the Library of Congress to write a poem to commemorate the victims of the attacks. Melissa Shaw: He read the resulting poem, The Names, at a special joint session of Congress in September 2002. It was a work the best-selling writing doesn't discuss much. But today, in light of the 20th anniversary of the September 11th attacks, Collins reflects on the assignment and the poem with writer Marybeth Reilly-McGreen, class of 1989, who profiled the native New Yorker and former New York Poet Laureate in the summer 2020 issue of Holy Cross Magazine. Here are Billy Collins and Marybeth Reilly-McGreen. Marybeth Reilly-McGreen: Thank you, Billy Collins, for being here today. And we are anticipating the 20th anniversary of 9/11, the attacks on America. At the time of the attacks you were U.S. Poet Laureate. Billy Collins: Correct. Marybeth Reilly-McGreen: You were asked to write a poem, The Names, which you then presented to a joint session of Congress on September 6th, 2002. If you would, we would love it if you would read it for us now. Billy Collins: Right. I'd be happy to read it then we can... and even happier to talk about it. The poem is called The Names and there is a parenthetical epigram below the title, and it reads, for the victims of September 11th and they're survivors. Yesterday, I lay awake in the palm of the night. A fine 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. Names printed on the ceiling of the night. Names slipping around a watery bend. Twenty-six willows on the banks of a stream. Billy Collins: In the morning, I walked out barefoot among thousands of flowers heavy with dew like the eyes of tears, and each had a name. Fiori inscribed on a yellow petal. Then Gonzalez and Han, Ishikawa and Jenkins. Names written in the air and stitched into the cloth of the day. A name under a photograph taped to a mailbox. Monogram on a torn shirt, I see you spelled out on storefront windows and on the bright unfurled awnings of this city. I say the syllables as I turn a corner, Kelly and Lee, Medina, Nardella, and O'Connor. When I peer into the woods, I see a thick tangle where letters are hidden as in a puzzle concocted for children. Billy Collins: Parker and Quigley in the twigs of an ash. Rizzo, Schubert, Torres, and Upton, secrets in the boughs of an ancient maple. Names written in the pale sky. Names rising in the updraft amid buildings. Names silent in stone or cried out behind a door. Names blown over the earth and out to sea. In the evening, weakening light, the last swallows, a boy on a lake lifts his oars. A woman by a window puts a match to a candle, and the names are outlined on the rose clouds, Vanacore and Wallace, let X stand, if it can, for the ones unfound. Then Young and Ziminsky, the final jolt of Z. Billy Collins: Names etched on the head of a pin. One name spanning a bridge, another undergoing a tunnel. A blue name needled into the skin. Names of citizens, workers, mothers and fathers, the bright-eyed daughter, the quick son. Alphabet of names in green rose in a field. Names in the small tracks of birds. Names lifted from a hat Or balanced on the tip of the tongue. Names wheeled into the dim warehouse of memory. So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart. Billy Collins: To talk about the poem a little bit, I was asked by Congress, well, not everyone at once, in Congress, but I was, I received a phone call I was appointed Poet Laureate in June of 2001. And, of course, that was not too far away from September. And so being the Poet Laureate then, Congress, it wasn't Congress, it was really a group of people who were organizing this event, which was a congressional event. Congress was meeting outside of New York City, extremely rare in the history of the country. I think, maybe the second or third time that it happened. One of them occasion by the British, when the British burned down the capital. That's something we might not think of when we're buying Burberry raincoats and stuff. Billy Collins: But anyway, so they asked me if I'd write a poem to read to Congress and I balked. I mean I was sort of, "A homina, homina homina." I didn't know what to say. I wanted to say, "No, I don't think so." Because my poems are about such small things, such small matters, leading to larger matters. But this was just facing a larger matter head on, instead of telling it slant, instead of finding a way into a topic. This was facing the topic head on. And that's sort of the nature of an occasional poem, a poem that's on a certain subject, a certain event, really. Billy Collins: So I said, I did say, "No." I didn't say wouldn't show up, because you really can't say that to Congress. But I said, "I don't think I could write a poem like that." I kind of bargained my way out of it, but it took a while. I said, "I'm honored to attend and I will read something. I will find something appropriate to read and powerful." And I thought, "Walt Whitman will somehow come to my aid." But then they continued, I thought that would be the end of the conversation. They being at least three people on this conference call. Billy Collins: One of them said, "Well, if you did, just saying, if you did right upon, please include the heroism of the first responders." Another person said, "Well, yeah, if you happen to change your mind, please mention something positive about the future of our country." I mean, it's on and on like that. So the more they kind of jumped on me with all these parts that I should, the more I thought I couldn't write that poem. But one morning, like a week or so later, I woke up, startlingly, about five in the morning, it was still dark. And I thought I really should get off the bench here. I mean, this was the duty of all poets laureate in the past. Billy Collins: The reason to have a poet laureate, and is a British condition and invention, which is about 370 years old at this point. The whole idea of having a poet laureate was to preserve in writing, in rhyme and meter, which were the preservatives of ice and salt, that Yeates calls rhyme and meter, preserving sentiment and preserving national events. We didn't have videotape cameras, recorders, any of that. So the poet was to store in the national memory some event rendered in poetry. So that sort of, thinking of that at five in the morning, got my attention. That I would join this sort of noble tradition of poets laureate who wrote occasional poems. Billy Collins: But then I figured out, and this is sort of more interesting for people who write poetry than not, I figured out a way to do it. I figured out a strategy, because I was writing on demand and I figured out two things. I figured out I could write an elegy, so that's a specific genre and English literature and literature. And if you're an English major, if you get to graduate school anyway, you'll know by heart the probably six or seven great elegies in the English language. By choosing the elegy, that meant I could circumscribe the fields of my endeavor or play. It's a poem for the dead. That's what an elegy is. Billy Collins: That's why the little epigram, for the survivors, that's there, because it declares that the poem is an elegy. So I could stay within these elegy boundaries without dealing with geopolitics, the uncertainty. I mean, by then we were at war. I mean, war was declared, I think, nine or 10 days after September 11th. It was a pretty hair trigger response. And who knows where that war was going to go? Well, we know something about that now. The other thing, the other device I used was I could use, going through the dead, I could use one letter of the alphabet to stand for, to symbolize, to represent all the people, all the victims, the 3,000-and-something victims of 9/11 by the letter of their surname. Billy Collins: So there, I had two things to hold on to, the enclosure of the elegy, where I'm writing a poem for the dead and then the alphabet, and then this whole sense of the tolling of the bell of the names. I haven't counted it up, but the word names must appear 30 times in that poem. It's kind of names doing this, names doing that. That kind of repetition, as it turned out, created this rhythm in the poem. Marybeth Reilly-McGreen: Talking about the repetition of the names, I remember, in watching C-SPAN, watching you give the poem to America really. But in watching you read it, Senator Moynihan looks spellbound. He looks
