I drove 10 hours over the last 2 days and had some time to listen to Billy Collins’ Masterclass on writing poetry.

It was good.

There were things I disagreed with: a title as a doormat, a poet’s goal is to “make readers fall in love with you”.

I suppose that latter one is a pretty big deal.

Because if that’s the goal, then I’m probably doing this wrong.

The title as doormat vs. the title as weird hallway

Collins says a title should act like a doormat: something that welcomes the reader in, reassures them, lets them know they’re in the right place.

There’s something generous in that, and I don’t hate it. I like clarity. I like a reader not needing a PhD in my personal trauma to understand what’s going on.

But “doormat” isn’t my thing.

I think of a title less like a doormat and more like the first step into a slightly confusing hallway: you know you’ve entered somewhere, you just don’t know what’s at the end.

Not a locked door. Not a brick wall. Just… a hallway that bends.

The difference is small but important. A doormat wants you to feel comfortable about the house you’re entering. A hallway says: you can come in, but you’ll need to walk a little first to find out what’s inside.

“Make readers fall in love with you”

The real friction point for me was that other line: that the goal of poetry is to “make readers fall in love with you.”

I get what he means, I think. Not literal romance, but something like:

Make the reader feel charmed by your consciousness. Make them want to spend more time in your head. Make them, in some way, adore your way of seeing.

And that’s fine. It works for a lot of people. It also explains a lot about Billy Collins poems: they often feel like you’re having coffee with a witty, approachable uncle who has a perfectly timed anecdote about lanyards or dogs or history.

But when I look at what I’m actually doing in my own poems, “please fall in love with me” is nowhere on the list.

If anything, it’s closer to: please realize something about yourself you were half-ignoring.

That does not require you to fall in love with me. It barely requires you to like me.

I don’t want to be the main character

A poem is not, to me, a dating profile.

Yes, there’s an “I” in a lot of my work. Yes, people I love and have failed and have lost show up. Yes, an occasional wolf eats a grandmother. That’s all technically “my” material.

But the center of gravity isn’t: look what a fascinating, sensitive, damaged, clever narrator I am.

If a reader comes away from my poems thinking “wow, I really like this guy,” I won’t complain. But that’s not on my mind when writing.

I’d rather they come away thinking: “oh, I’ve been that person,” or “oh, my memory has done that to people I loved,” or “oh, I know what it’s like to quietly want the wrong thing.”

In other words: instead of falling in love with me, I’d prefer they fall uncomfortably in recognition with themselves.

Intimacy without seduction

Part of what unsettles me about “make them fall in love with you” is that it frames the whole thing as a kind of seduction.

There’s a built-in asymmetry there: I, the poet, am performing. You, the reader, are hopefully swooning.

What I want feels more horizontal than that.

I want to put language around something I genuinely don’t fully understand yet, and invite you to stand in the same confusion with me for a minute.

If you leave the poem thinking I’m a genius, that’s honestly less interesting to me than you walking through the weird hallway and seeing something you didn’t expect, but which made you think about yourself in some way.

Disagreeing with your elders (without combusting)

None of this is an attack on Billy Collins. He’s good at what he does. He’s clear, he’s hospitable, he’s funny. Of course his advice will point toward a mode that suits him.

What this road-trip Masterclass binge did, though, was force me to say out loud:

“Oh. That’s not my goal at all.”

Which is a terrifying sentence the first time you say it about a Famous Person’s craft advice. It sounds like you’re confessing to being wrong. Or immature. Or “not serious.”

But poetry isn’t a single-player game where one person finds the rules and everyone else copies them forever.

So maybe that’s the actual takeaway here:

• His poems can have doormats if they want.
• Mine can have side doors, or trap doors, or weird mirrored hallways.
• His goal can be to make you fall in love with him.
• Mine can be to make you feel slightly haunted by something you thought you’d forgotten.

There’s room for all of that.

If nothing else, at least the next time I sit down to revise, I’ll know which voice in my head is mine, and which one is just a Very Famous Poet suggesting I lay out a nicer doormat.

I might still borrow some of his advice. A lot of what he said about journalling mirrors things I do myself.

But the “make them fall in love with you” part? I think I’m going to leave that one on the side of the highway.