These days, I’m immersing myself in a great deal of poetry, though, lately, it’s the work of American poet Billy Collins that has been capturing the bulk of my attention.

What I want us to think about today, though, is not his poetry but a passage of his prose from the preface to The Apple That Astonished Paris. Here, he discusses one particularly noteworthy event early on in his career, back when he first began submitting his work for publication:

“After what seemed like a very long wait, the manuscript of forty-five or so poems made its way back to me … Inside I found not a letter of acceptance with a contract waiting to be signed, but rather a short note from Miller Williams saying that he had put a paper clip around the two dozen or so poems that he liked. This group did not add up to a book, he [said], but if I could write twenty-five or thirty poems as good as those …, he said he would be my publisher.

When I spread all the poems out on a table and compared the two groups, I knew just what he had found in the better poems and what he had not found in the others, because it was not there. If the best thing a writing teacher can do for [their] students is to point out their strengths, then that little paperclip was worth an MFA degree to me. Williams’s words were more encouragement than I had ever gotten before and more than enough to inspire me to begin taking my writing more seriously…”

Some fifteen years later, it was from those early, paper-clipped beginnings that Collins went on to become Poet Laureate of the United States.

I share this story with you not because it’s unusual, because, aside from his becoming Poet Laureate, I don’t think that it is particularly unusual. Rather, I share this with you because it’s simply one of the so many — so, so many — stories of early encouragement that I’m constantly coming across in the biographies and memoirs of now-successful figures.

It’s almost always something small like this that launches their careers, giving them the tools they need to get from where they are to where they hope to be: a few words of enthusiasm, a minor course adjustment, an invitation to keep going. But, small as those life-changing actions so consistently are, they nonetheless require that someone take the time to do them, take the time to write that short note or to say those few words.

After all, Williams didn’t have to give Collins any feedback. He didn’t have to do anything other than print out a form-letter rejection, stuff his poems into an envelope, and drop the whole thing off at the nearest post office. That was all that was required of him, all that his responsibilities to this poet he had never met — and knew nothing about — included. But, instead, knowing that Collins would likely benefit from whatever direction he could give him, Williams chose to separate his poems into two groups, attach a paperclip to the ones he liked best, and write a short note urging him to send more.

He went out of his way to encourage the young poet, to assure him that there was indeed something about his work that was worth pursuing. And for Collins, who had never been given even that much encouragement, just that little bit of extra effort on Williams’ part made all the difference to the future Poet Laureate.

Might we not, then, make more of an effort to do what Williams did for Collins in our own lives? Might we not, in other words, offer our own versions of those paper-clipped poems to the people who come to us for help?

Waving from my desk,
– J