Someone named Edward Short, writing this month for The Weekly Standard, considers different editions of the Oxford Anthologies of poets American and English. I'm grateful for his heads-up that the anthology of 18th century verse published in 2003 has evidently shaken up a lot of cherished conceptions of that time, a favorite era of mine. I may look into that.
But, reviewing the latest American anthology, he rhetorically asks, "Why give 10 pages to Billy Collins?" I think I know where that whiff of condescension comes from, and I can answer his question.
The Trouble with Billy Collins?
Collins has just published another collection, The Trouble with Poetry. I have hesitated to buy it, because I put down the last collection Nine Horses mid-way, feeling suddenly as if I'd been duped. Familiarity with his poetry had bred contempt, and I thought it was time for a trial separation.
Maybe I'd heard him read too often on public radio. I could hear the same tone to poem after poem. There's a deadpan wise guy sound in his delivery that always gets them laughing, me included.
Then, I had discerned a pattern that began to feel like a formula. Starting either with some mundane found word or object or else with an amusing premise ("What if all the allegories were retired to Florida?" - probably occasioned by a momentary confusion with alligator), his poems spend around twelve lines making whimsical observations about the object until a metaphor takes him on a tangent to something metaphysical. A lot of the fun comes from seeing at the end how far we've strayed from the premise.
But after five collections in one year, Collins was cloying.
Two Cheers for Collins
And yet. . .
Until I heard Collins speak, I'd left poetry behind. It was an English major's cross to bear. But I heard him on the day he was appointed Poet Laureate, speaking of how poetry should be accessible. Curious, I bought Questions About Angels for fun reading when I had time to kill in Baltimore (at an English teachers' convention, natch).
From page one, with a few exceptions, Collins connected to me. For the first time, it hit me that a poem is a kind of joke, with a set up, carefully calibrated timing, but of which the punchline may elicit "Ah!" or "Ooo!" instead of "Ha!"
I purchased the other collections in quick succession, and branched out to other poets that I've enjoyed. So I'm grateful to Collins for opening me (and others, I'm sure) to a medium that had appeared to be dying. Let's give credit also to others working successfully in the same direction: Dana Gioia, Ted Kooser.
Adhering to a pattern isn't a crime -- Shakespeare wrote 120-odd sonnets that end predictably with a twist in the last two lines -- and besides, there's more variety to his work than I've let on. At the back of the first collection I bought, I wrote a list of Collins poem types:
- snapshots
- what ifs
- character soliloquies
- riddles - last line = answer
- extended metaphor
- scene described, then reflected on
- take off from a quotation or cliché
- compression of an entire life
And, besides, knowing the pattern has not taken the edge and pleasure off a large number of poems. How about "Forgetfulness," which I've memorized without half trying (ironically):
The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of. . .
There's another one, about the pictures and mysterious strings of letters in his "First Reader," touching on the way we can let our words and thoughts mediate between us and our world: "we were forgetting how to look, learning how to read."
Just to spite the critic, I'll go out this weekend to buy Collins's latest collection. I already know two of its poems well, having heard Collins read them more than once on the radio: "Lanyard" a riff on that word that turns into an hilarious, honest, and maybe painful reminder of the casual ingratitude of children, and "The Revenant" which is indeed, intentionally, a joke - reversing the kind of sentimental poem in which the dog who has "passed on" looks back on life from the doggie afterlife. Instead of gratitude, this dog lets it be known how he was annoyed by that jingly collar, and how humiliating it was to jump and dance around and wag his tail to motivate the master to take him for a walk. I think about it every time I put a leash on my capering dogs.
Humor, memorable insights, new ways of looking at ordinary things, and accessibility: I'd say ten pages of Billy Collins is just about right.
4 comments:
Ran into a posting by a writer in Rhode Island who recently heard Collins speak. Good idea: read poets in chronological order, but backwards!
Link to that site: Stone and Plank, home of a center (retreat?) for writers and artists.
I wish I had more time to respond at the moment, but a quickie post'll have to suffice.
Yeah, you're on to something, describing Collins as "cloying." It seems his biggest draw is his blue-collar, poetry-for-everybody aesthetic. He's accessible. The problem, though? Poetry, no matter how accessible, isn't popular, even if it's popular in the poetry section. People will read a hundred Dan Brown novels before they pick up a book of poetry.
For those that do pick up a book of poetry from the bestseller list, Collins'll give them an nice little book of safe poems. They'll go down real easy and look nice on a coffee table.
Collins writes "cute" poems. I think it's giving him too much credit to compare the Shakespearean sonnet convention with the Collins/Kooser "pattern" (read "variations on the same joke"). Nowadays, poetry needn't have a strict form </obvious>. Popular poetry rehashes an outmoded aesthetic: the single-subject "I," the "poem-as-truth," the "look how observant and sensitive I am," the "open-a-vein-and-let-my-truth-spill-out" hokeyness.
That's not to say that popular poetry doesn't have its bright spots. It would be inaccurate, however, to say that Collins and other popular poets fully represent contemporary (or exciting) poetry.
But maybe that's just mean ol' academia gettin' fussy over nothin'. =)
Thanks for responding.
This question of "accessibility" comes up a lot in all the things I love, not just in poetry. Stephen Sondheim's musicals have been commercial flops and "inaccessible"; symphonic composers of the mid-20th century fell into opposing camps - those who continued to use rhythm, melody, and harmony to create dramatic or beautiful effects, and the others who aimed for a purity of technique unsullied by emotion - typified by Milton Babbitt's famous question to the public, "Who cares if you listen?" (surprise! He was Stephen Sondheim's tutor.)
Your response made me wonder at this part: Popular poetry rehashes an outmoded aesthetic: the single-subject "I," the "poem-as-truth," the "look how observant and sensitive I am," the "open-a-vein-and-let-my-truth-spill-out" hokeyness.
When I do connect to a poem, I would like to think it's because the writer has found a way -- be it an image, an anecdote, a bit of rhetoric -- to express something that I didn't know I knew and recognize immediately to be true.
I, too, can't stand the stuff that's all about "me, the poet." But I like the stuff about the poet's world that, deep down, is about me, too.
Interesting commentary. I too, a poet, find Collins interesting and boring at the same time.
Most recently, I found his reasons for choosing poems for The Best American Poetry 2006, once again, interesting but this time also full of horse "padoody".
What an enigaman.
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