From Victoria’s Secret to Emily Dickinson’s clothes

It’s unlikely that too many people are excited about National Poetry Month — if they even know that it’s this month. The word “poetry” might bring back unpleasant memories of that anthology in high school English class, the pages footnoted, the stodgy verse as incomprehensible as a foreign language — and the teacher forcing you to dissect each word. No, poetry is not usually associated with fun.

But Billy Collins would like to change that.

And he’s already making great progress. The former US Poet Laureate has broken sales records with his books of poetry and enjoys a rare widespread popularity.

That’s because a Billy Collins poem doesn’t dress in a stuffy suit and tie, talking down to you or over your head. A Billy Collins poem opens the door in its flannel pajamas and invites you to sit on the couch and share a cup of coffee. It tells an intimate, little story, punctuated with humor and a bit of poignancy. You can relate to Collins’ poems and — dare I say it — enjoy them.

It was an extraordinary experience to see a poet captivate and entertain nearly 800 people simply by reading his poems. That’s exactly what Collins did at last month’s Art Center Design Conference in Pasadena, making the crowd laugh — even after a full day of presentations — right from the start.

“I am PowerPoint-less,” he began. “I don’t know if that’s a word. I’m going to read some poems to you as the ancient bards did — without PowerPoint.”

The audience was mesmerized by good, old-fashioned words. A poem about “Forgetfulness” had them in stitches: “one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain, to a little fishing village where there are no phones.”

Poetry, by its very nature, can be inaccessible. Collins told the Weekly that it’s “probably the most egotistical art you can involve yourself in because poetry is basically about me, about the speaker. I mean, you can take photographs of other things. If a poet had a camera, he would just take pictures of himself over and over again.”

But Collins, who is “very reader-conscious” in his writing, has found a way to connect with his audience.

Whether he’s writing about turning up his stereo to drown out the neighbors’ dog barking (“Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep a Gun in the House”) or a Bee Gees song stuck in his head (“More Than a Woman”), Collins makes it look so easy to write an engaging poem about an ordinary experience. Subjects such as a bicycle ride, the Victoria’s Secret catalog and the man in the moon instantly draw us into his poems, and the straightforward vocabulary and conversational tone keep us entranced.

Collins takes great pride in that simplicity of language.

“I have a number of books and a big volume, an anthology, of Chinese poetry,” Collins said, “and regularly, very often before I write, I’ll just flip it open and read a few pages for the clarity and the lucidity and the very natural vocabulary. It’s very calming, and haiku is too.”

At the conference, Collins shared a haiku that won him $25: midwinter evening / alone at the sushi bar / just me and this eel.

He has a book of haiku, three-line poems of 17 syllables, due out this year. It’s called “She Was Just Seventeen.”

That Collins can reference a Beatles tune in something as esoteric as haiku is just another example of his inimitable humor.

“Humor is a seductive strategy in a way,” said Collins, who was the inaugural recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Mark Twain Award for humorous poetry. “If you can create a humorous reaction in someone right away, you’ve drawn a circle around you and the reader so you’re inside this humor, and then you can go off in other directions so the poem is not as funny at the end as it is in the beginning.

“Humor was kind of eliminated from poetry for centuries, but I think it’s back now, and just because a poem is funny doesn’t mean it’s lightweight or frivolous.”

Even a poem titled “Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes” ends in a surprising and thought-provoking way.

“The progress of the poem is very important to me,” Collins said, “and the progress is usually from something that’s very clear, something that we as readers all have in common pretty much as a starting place. And then the poem is meant to move into much more mysterious territory where I’m a little more in control. We were kind of together in the beginning, and now I’m kind of leading you into areas of uncertainty.

“So I think accessibility and clarity for me are things that occur best at the beginning of the poem. I don’t want the poem to be completely accessible. I wouldn’t bother writing them. I want to end up in a mysterious place where even I don’t know where we are exactly. We’ve slipped down a rabbit hole or something.”

As US Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2003, Collins made it his mission to promote the appreciation of poetry. To that end, he developed Poetry 180, a program encouraging high schools to have a poem read during morning announcements each of the 180 school days. He compiled a book of accessible contemporary poems and asked that the students not be forced to analyze them but simply hear one read each day by someone different: a student, a teacher, an administrator, a janitor.

Collins, who is also distinguished professor of English at Lehman College, City University of New York, where he has taught for more than three decades, followed up “Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry” with “180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day.” He’s also written eight collections of poetry, including “Sailing Alone Around the Room” and “Nine Horses,” but he does not see the value of analyzing his own work.

“I think to get a writer or a painter to talk about their own work is a little like getting a dog interested in a mirror,” he said. “You can take a dog and say ‘Look, there’s you in front of the mirror.’ Dogs just blank out. They’re not interested. There’s no smell there, and they don’t know why you are holding their head in front of this thing. And I think talking about your own writing is a little like that.”

Collins prefers to have his work speak for him.

“The more I would just talk about myself, the less people would like me. Because I’m better on the page,” he said. “John Ruskin, the 19th-century writer, and his wife had a pretty terrible marriage, and when Ruskin died, they asked Mrs. Ruskin ‘What was he like?’ and she just said, ‘He was best on the page,’ and left it at that.”