Writer-in-Residence for Krispy Kreme

A friend wrote me a message today mentioning that he had been to a reading by Billy Collins, former US Poet Laureate (and a very wealthy man). 


As Wikipedia says: "Billy Collins has been called 'The most popular poet in America' by the New York Times. When he moved from the University of Pittsburgh Press to Random House, the advance he received shocked the poetry world-- a six-figure sum for a three-book deal, virtually unheard of in poetry."


You may recall in a post about Rod McKuen I hinted that being the best-selling, most popular and well-known poet of your day is not a great thing in contemporary America. Heck, there are more news stories  and blog posts being written right this instant about Lady Gaga than about the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. (Who does, incidentally, have an amazing p-p-poker face.)


But I'd like to excerpt a bit of his perceptive message for you. (I'm fairly sure he won't mind.)


"I was completely unimpressed... I mean not that it was badly written, just somewhat shallow or so it seemed to me... Anyway he won every poetry award under the sun and I was not sure why."


I'd like to give another quote by way of comparison/contrast, this one from a poet I quite respect and model some of my writing after.


"We seem to always know where we are in a Billy Collins poem, but not necessarily where he is going. I love to arrive with him at his arrivals. He doesn't hide things from us, as I think lesser poets do. He allows us to overhear, clearly, what he himself has discovered." -Stephen Dunn


If that's not damning with faint praise, I am not entirely unrelated to a simian. He doesn't hide things from us? It could be because there seems precious little to hide - it's all laid out right there, unambiguous as a greeting card or a sitcom laugh track.


That's not to say he's a bad poet. Considering he's one of the richest poets alive, he's got something that appeals to a wide range of people, both poetry-lovers and people who don't know Keats from Yeats. (Or Kates from Yeets.) I don't have the ego, unpublished penniless wretch that I am, to claim he's even mediocre. He's got a lot of technical mastery, his verses are generally light and comprehensible, musical to the ear, spoken easily. They're rarely memorable, but you don't get rich by writing poetry for the ages. (Future generations are notoriously miserly to dead poets.)


So at the risk of seeming like an arrogant jack-hole, I'll say this - his work lacks soul. I adore restraint, I swoon for understatement, there's nothing sexier than barely repressed emotions being brought tightly under control beneath a thin layer of willpower. (We'll talk more about how this relates to free verse as opposed to more "traditional verse" another time.) But there's a difference between playing things close to your chest and not holding any cards.


If somebody like Stephen Dunn has the melody and depth of Sam Cooke, Billy Collins is more like Michael McDonald. He's got the cotton-gauze pipes, there's no doubt he's utterly sincere, but it's just too ready-made, too Adult Contemporary to do much but waft in the background.


Here, let me show you what I mean.

Fishing on the Susquehanna in July

Billy Collins

I have never been fishing on the Susquehanna
or on any river for that matter
to be perfectly honest.


Not in July or any month
have I had the pleasure--if it is a pleasure--
of fishing on the Susquehanna.


I am more likely to be found
in a quiet room like this one--
a painting of a woman on the wall,


a bowl of tangerines on the table--
trying to manufacture the sensation
of fishing on the Susquehanna.


There is little doubt
that others have been fishing
on the Susquehanna,


rowing upstream in a wooden boat,
sliding the oars under the water
then raising them to drip in the light.


But the nearest I have ever come to
fishing on the Susquehanna
was one afternoon in a museum in Philadelphia


when I balanced a little egg of time
in front of a painting
in which that river curled around a bend


under a blue cloud-ruffled sky,
dense trees along the banks,
and a fellow with a red bandanna


sitting in a small, green
flat-bottom boat
holding the thin whip of a pole.


That is something I am unlikely
ever to do, I remember
saying to myself and the person next to me.


Then I blinked and moved on
to other American scenes
of haystacks, water whitening over rocks,


even one of a brown hare
who seemed so wired with alertness
I imagined him springing right out of the frame.




It's easy to read out loud, the line breaks are perfectly sensible, imagery clear, one thought easily progressing to another until you end up somewhere different than when you began. Good, fine, well done.


But if I asked you to give me something from the poem - a line, an image, a sensation, a thought, something that moved or stirred or provoked or interested you... The only thing that gave me any feeling at all was the horrendous attempt at rhyming "Susquehanna" with "bandana." 


I'll try to be more generous - it's not all like that. Here's one I somewhat enjoyed, obvious thought it may be.

Introduction to Poetry

Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide


or press an ear against its hive.


I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,


or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.


I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.


But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.


They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.




There's some interesting images - I like the waterski, the police interrogation. Even the thought behind it has a nice ring of truth, the students asking, "But what is the poet SAYING?! Why didn't he just SAY that instead of tarting it up like a Mardi Gras float?" and the poet-teacher's exasperation at the same.


But again, like the donut, it's all sugar and nothing at the center. There's no feeling, no heart beating at the core. And that's what bothers me, more than Collins' sometimes lame attempts at humor or the sense that he's Robert Frost for people who don't understand Robert Frost. It's folksy, but the wisdom that folksiness is draped over is just more folksiness.


So I have no problems with Billy Collins, just like I have no real problems with the Doobie Brothers. Perfectly pleasant, somewhat limited in their palettes but they can still provide meager pleasures nonetheless. But you would never find a young artist modeling themselves after such examples. Even wanting to be Pearl Jam or the Jonas Brothers or Robert Frost or - heaven forbid! - Allen Ginsberg is at least some forceful, powerful example at whose feet you can sit and learn. 


At Collins' feet you sit for a minute, get drowsy, then lie back on the carpet and let the words flow past you. It's a fun way to spend an evening, but it's no way to live your life.