18 pages • 36 minutes read
Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep A Gun In The House
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Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“The Names” by Billy Collins (2001)
This is from the PBS Newshour, broadcast on the 10-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Billy Collins reads the poem, one of his most renowned and important, starting at :42. “The Names” is Collins’s tribute to the victims of the attacks and is startlingly different in tone to “Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep A Gun In The House.” There is no graphic imagery in the clip but the traumatic historical event is referenced.
“The Breather” by Billy Collins (2008)
This poem is about lost love and—similar to other poems—Collins uses a surprising analogy to discuss an everyday situation. As the speaker makes the dog part of Beethoven’s symphony in “Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep A Gun In The House,” the speaker in this poem imagines themself as the psycho in a horror movie who heavily breathes into the guest room phone. The speaker realizes the love was one-sided, coming from inside his own haunted house.
“Passengers” by Billy Collins (1998)
First published in Picnic, Lightning (1998), this poem features a speaker’s observations in the airport before boarding a plane. Like “Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep A Gun In The House,” the poem features an imaginative leap about what would happen if the plane went down, and lingers on the small details of importance concerning the passengers. The making of the poem is offered as a sort of artifact in an equivalent way as the speaker’s recounting of the barking dog is seen as created art.
Further Literary Resources
“The Art of Poetry No. 83” in The Paris Review by George Plimpton (2001)
This interview by renowned editor George Plimpton took place shortly after Collins was appointed US Poet Laureate. Collins offers his opinions on writing, revision, and notes the “giddy imaginative liberty” of poetic form. He reports that “in a poem you have the greatest imaginative freedom possible in language. You have no allegiance to plot, consistency, plausibility, character development, chronology.” This relates to the imaginative leaps taken by the speaker in “Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep A Gun in the House.”
“Billy Collins, Former US Poet Laureate, Comes to Vanderbilt“ by Liz Furlow (2011)
This is a repost of an interview that first appeared on Inside Vandy, Vanderbilt University’s online newspaper. When interviewer Liz Furlow asks Collins if his work is autobiographical, he says:
It is autobiographical in that I thought of it—my self is involved in it. But I don't talk much about past experiences that happened to me. I try to present a speaker in my poems who is existing pretty much in the present. He's in the present moment, observing something and indulging in some speculations in what he's looking at.
This is akin to the positioning Collins’s speaker takes in “Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep A Gun In the House.”
“Everyday Moments, Caught in Time” TED Talk with Billy Collins (2012)
In this talk, Collins discusses a series of animated shorts made of his poems in collaboration with the Sundance Channel. Collins discusses his work with humor, which applies to “Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep A Gun In the House.” This talk has been viewed 1.4 million times, demonstrating Collins’s popularity.
“Billy Collins ’63: The Making of An American Poet“ by Holy Cross Magazine (2020)
This interview covers Collins’s career and popularity as well as his contributions to American poetry. Collins comments on his poetic development, his influences (Bugs Bunny and Robert Frost), his school days, and his views about poetry. His discussion of how he constructs poetry applies to “Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep A Gun In the House.”
Listen to Poem
This is the poem read by Collins. It was uploaded in 2014, taken from Collins’s audio recording The Best Cigarette (1997), which includes 33 poems.
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By Billy Collins
