"We're All Born With 200 Bad Poems in Us"

BILLY COLLINS: We love, you know, children love the ingredients of poetry. And then they go into this tunnel that we call adolescence, and when they come out of it, they hate poetry.

KEN SAGAL: Well, when I was an adolescent, and I'm sure this is true of - let's see, this is NPR - 98 percent of our audience, I wrote very sad, melancholy, self-indulgent poetry.

COLLINS: I did, too.

SAGAL: Right, well I wanted to ask, I mean, was your - since you are now a successful and award-winning poet - do you feel that your self-indulgent, adolescent poetry was better than average?

COLLINS: Well, we all have - we're all born with 200 bad poems in us.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: Really?

COLLINS: This is statistically proven. And so - and middle school and high school is a good time to get rid of those. And - but I wrote this - I believe, because this is what I was reading, I believed that poetry was two things. It was hard to understand, but one thing you could understand is the poet was miserable.

SAGAL: Yes.

COLLINS: So I pretended to be miserable, and it's very easy to write poems that are hard to understand. Finally, I read poets who were not so miserable, in fact humorous. And they gave me permission to release what I was repressing, which was this sense of humor I inherited from my father.

Not My Job: Poet Billy Collins Takes A Quiz About Phil Collins

"You Don't Want the Flying Monkeys in the First Line"

TOM BODETT: And I'm a bit of a fanboy here, but I just want to say that what you do with poetry is rarely done, is you - almost all of your poems have a punchline of some kind. And I've got to believe that that makes poetry so much more approachable for people.

BILLY COLLINS: Thank you, I'm smiling now. You can't see me, but I'm smiling.

KEN SAGAL: Well, your poems, they do tend to be - they tend to be about things you've done or seen. They're accessible.

BILLY COLLINS: Yeah, they usually start out very straightforwardly and plainly. I think it's good not to make demands on the reader too early. But as the poem goes on, I want the journey of the poem to lead into some interesting places. I sort of like the idea of Dorothy, you know, that the poem begins in Kansas, and maybe ends in Oz. But I want - a lot of poems start in Oz, and I think that's - that puts people off. You don't want the flying monkeys in the first line.

Not My Job: Poet Billy Collins Takes A Quiz About Phil Collins

Willie Watson's Top-Five American Rock Bands of All Time

Weld: Who are the top five American rock bands of all time?

Willie Watson: American rock bands? Well that’s tough, because most rock bands are English. Well, the Heartbreakers. And this is in no particular order: I want to say Crazy Horse, but they’re Canadian. The Grateful Dead. I don’t know — the Crickets? [Laughs] Scratch that.

Those guys that played with Chuck Berry – the piano player and all those guys that made those early records with Chuck. Elvis’s early band — the Tennessee Three or something like that, whatever those guys were called.

Weld: That’s four.

Willie Watson: I wish I could just say Crazy Horse.

Weld: I mean, the Band always gets a pass because of Levon Helm, so…

Willie Watson: Oh my God, I want to say the Band, but they’re Canadian, too. All right, let’s say Crazy Horse.

Willie Watson will perform at Bottletree Cafe on Wednesday, April 2. Doors open at 8 p.m., while the show begins at 9 p.m. Philos Moore will open. Tickets are $10. On Tuesday, April 1, Watson will be performing at John Paul White’s 116 E. Mobile Street venue in Florence, Ala. Tickets for that show are also $10.