Honoring Billy Collins
Over the coming weeks, as we make our way toward The Great Turning: Honoring a Legacy. Inspiring the Future, the Charter for Compassion's Global Gala on October 24, we will introduce you to the remarkable people we will honor with this year's Karen Armstrong Humanitarian Awards. We begin with a poet.
Billy Collins, former Poet Laureate of the United States, has spent a lifetime doing something that lies very close to the heart of compassion: paying attention. His poems rarely announce great moral lessons. They begin instead with things we recognize—a cup of coffee, a dog, a bicycle, a window, a parent, a child growing older, something forgotten, something noticed on a walk. And then, almost before we realize it, Collins has taken us somewhere deeper. Perhaps that is one reason poetry and compassion belong together.
Compassion begins with attention. Before we can care about another person, we have to see them. Before we can understand another life, we have to become curious about it. Poetry interrupts our tendency to hurry past one another. It asks us to stop long enough to notice. Billy Collins has been doing that for decades.
That gift was tested in an extraordinary way after September 11, 2001. As U.S. Poet Laureate, Collins was asked to write a poem commemorating the first anniversary of the attacks. He called it simply “The Names.” He read it before a special session of Congress held at Federal Hall in New York City on September 6, 2002. The poem was dedicated to those who died and to those who survived them. He begins: Yesterday, I lay awake in the palm of the night. And then the names begin. Ackerman. Baxter. Calabro.
One after another, Collins places names into the natural and human world. They appear in rain, flowers, trees, photographs, clothing, storefronts, and the sky. It is a profoundly compassionate choice. The enormous number of people killed on September 11 can overwhelm our capacity to comprehend the loss. Numbers become statistics. But a name belongs to a person. A name was spoken by a mother. Written on a birthday card. Called across a room. Printed on a work badge. Whispered by someone who loved that person. Collins refuses to allow the dead to disappear into a number. Near the poem's conclusion, he writes: Names silent in stone / Or cried out behind a door. That small image takes us from public memorial to private grief—from the names carved into history to the name of someone still being called for at home.
This is something poetry can do that statistics cannot. It can return us to the human being. That same tenderness appears throughout Collins's poetry, although often accompanied by his unmistakable humor. In “Forgetfulness,” he writes about the experience of memory gradually slipping away. It begins almost comically—the author's name disappears, followed by the title and plot of a book. But beneath the humor is something deeply human: an acknowledgment of aging and the vulnerability awaiting all of us. By the end, even a forgotten poem becomes something beautiful: the moon in the window seems to have drifted from a love poem once known by heart. Collins doesn't scold us for forgetting. He recognizes himself—and us—in it.
In “On Turning Ten,” he does something equally remarkable. Instead of treating a child's sorrow as insignificant because adults have experienced supposedly greater losses, he enters the child's world and takes that sadness seriously. The child walks: through the universe in my sneakers. And suddenly the passage from childhood innocence into an awareness of vulnerability becomes worthy of poetry.
In the wonderfully brief “No Time,” Collins drives past the cemetery where his parents are buried. In his hurry, he taps the horn. The rest of the poem imagines his father's disapproval and his mother's familiar response. In only a handful of lines, grief becomes intimate, humorous and recognizable—the dead remain part of the family conversation. And in “Aimless Love,” his attention widens still further. On an ordinary walk, affection attaches itself to a bird, a tiny mouse, a seamstress working at her machine, food, trees and the commonplace objects surrounding him. The poem imagines a form of love freed from possession and expectation. Perhaps compassion begins there, too: noticing what we have grown not to notice.
Collins once created a project as Poet Laureate called Poetry 180, placing a poem before high-school students for every day of the school year. His hope was that students could encounter poems without immediately having to dissect them—that poetry might become an “eye-opening part of their everyday experience.” That idea feels remarkably close to the work of compassion. A poem asks us to inhabit someone else's observation for a moment. To look through another person's window, hear another person's memory, and to feel the importance of something we might have dismissed.
Perhaps poetry does not make us compassionate automatically. But it can exercise some of the capacities compassion requires such as attention, imagination, curiosity, vulnerability, and wonder. And Billy Collins has spent a lifetime reminding us that we do not always have to travel very far to find them. We simply have to pay attention.
On October 24, the Charter for Compassion will honor Billy Collins with the Karen Armstrong Humanitarian Award at our Global Gala, The Great Turning: Honoring a Legacy. Inspiring the Future, at Fisher Pavilion at Seattle Center.
Billy joins this year's remarkable group of honorees: Karen Armstrong herself, receiving the Founders' Award; Heide Felton, receiving the Karen Armstrong Humanitarian Award posthumously; and Sue Cooper, recipient of our first Karen Armstrong Community Award.
This year's Gala is also a homecoming. Seattle was the first city in the world to affirm the Charter for Compassion and helped give birth to what has become a global network of Compassionate Communities. On October 24, we will return to Seattle to honor that legacy—and to ask what we will build together next. And wherever you live, you can be part of it. This is more than an awards evening. It is our opportunity to gather, celebrate, remember, and help sustain the work that carries compassion from an idea into action.
