REMARKS BY SAMINA SHAHIDI MCDONALD AT
"AN EVENING WITH BILLY COLLINS"
delivered at The CUNY Graduate Center, October 13, 2004

I studied with Prof. Collins in the Spring of 2002, during his first year of service in what would be a three year stint as Poet Laureate of the United States. It was for us at Lehman College, where I teach and am enrolled in a Masters of Arts program, an affirmation of what Lehman College is and what Lehman College does. While I was invariably assigning a Billy Collins poem to my students in my morning sessions, Prof. Collins, himself, would stroll into class in the early evenings, the rain of New Zealand, New Mexico or New Jersey still pearling his lapels. It meant a great deal to the graduate students at Lehman to have Prof. Collins teaching there, particularly at the beginning of his national reign. Most of us, teachers in the public school system took heed of the Poetry 180 program he had developed, relieved to find that poetry could be not only be discussed, but taught in a straightforward, demystified manner. His openness to hearing all variety of poetry modeled to us a crucial attitude that seems to be absent in the drawn lines of our contemporary MFAs, canon wars, and spoken words vs. written words debates.

Studying with Prof. Collins was a bit like being led gently, but firmly, through his essays on poetry, or equally instructive, floating on one of his poems. The landscape you, the reader, traverse is dotted with the ordinary until you draw closer to the shore and realize that folded over a chair is the poet's suit of skin, or that the trees have joined their arms in a kind of calligraphy. There is the amiable voice insinuating itself, widely celebrated for its sly turns, and yet. My husband, a gifted poet in his own right, pointed out several years ago that if you looked beneath Collin's gorgeous glide you'd find a world of flitting shadows. In some poems, a quiet undertow. You are often too busy enjoying the graceful momentum of narrative, a sonorous river, to notice that your poem boat is pulled along by a steady scholarship, an unwavering eye.

In this way a student of Billy Collins is encouraged, through this illuminated focus, what it means to write, what it means to work towards the unpredictable windfall of imagination. That writing through imagination will yield something significant seems almost a bromide. However the actual process of wrestling, cajoling, threatening, and eventually inviting the unknown onto your already un-neatened page is an education in itself. At one point you fancy that you are joined in a somewhat similar kind of uncertain labor with Milton 's transcribing daughters, or the painstaking efforts of Irish monks shivering as they render the Gospels, or the poet himself until what you hear most clearly is the sound of a pen roughing a path into the coming evening. If you are observant enough, you'll notice that the assignment your Professor has given you requires that you respond to poem you read for the first time. Your response: a dodgy butt end of doggerel, a scrap of supposition and a rhyme tacked onto the end as a “so there!” flourish of amateur writer bravado. A response no less, your ticket stub into the enactment of the dialogic. In addition, that Emily Dickinson poem Prof. Collins assigned you to memorize is fluttering in your stomach, will tick against your lungs for the rest of your life. Anything that passes through you onto the page will be informed by the clean, spare image, the hope of writing towards transport.

Being a student of Billy Collins means that you will be listened to patiently, and encouraged generously. It entails a learning of the discourses of aesthetics, structure, form and language. Simultaneously, you are also being taught how to teach, bringing with you into your classroom that care for literature, that necessary regard for your students. I have had the good fortune to work with professors at Lehman who have demanded rigorous effort and practice, coupled with a dedication to serve a student population that arguably has its considerable share of responsibility. This purpose is what Billy Collins has come to exemplify. I can think of no better way to honor the kind of commitment Prof. Collins has demonstrated to Lehman for the last thirty years than The Billy Collins scholarship.

In supporting this scholarship, we stand behind this son of Irish and French Canadian immigrants extending his considerable knowledge and craft to Lehman students, themselves the writing sons and daughters of North Americans and Latino, African, Arab, Eastern European and Asian immigrants, our future poets and writers.

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