Which Craftsmen do You Study?

Billy Collins writes poetry that should be read every day. His imagination and the way he shapes what he finds in it make his work special. In “2128,” he’s imagining the 200th birthday of a man named Donald Hall:

… No one ever thought to tell me
that he and I would live
beyond anyone’s expectations
and that the challenge would be
to figure out how to keep ourselves busy.

Were not Tennyson’s “Tithonus”
and Swift’s sketch of the Struldbrugs
eloquent enough warnings
of the dangers of living too long?

And here’s a more recent proof:
me pacing around a dining room table
from dawn until noon
then devoting the rest of the day
to whittling pencils that stopped writing long ago. …

Thankfully, my pencils have not stopped writing, but I haven’t picked them up enough to see if they are even worth whittling—and it’s the pool table that I pace around; we don’t have a dining room table.

Writing is working with words, and Collins uses his tools and materials beautifully. How does thinking in such terms—tools and materials, rather than thoughts and sentences—change the way I wish to work?