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Letters to Author
An Apology for Poetry, or, Why Bother With
Billy Collins?
Review of Billy Collins,
Sailing Alone Around the Room: Random
House, 2001.
Billy
Collins is, after Jewel, America’s best-selling
poet. He rose to fame by being a frequent
guest on Garrison Keillor’s Prairie
Home Companion radio show. Last year he
received a million-dollar book contract from
Random House. (There are probably fewer than
ten poets in the world who can make a living
strictly from book royalties–most others
teach.) Billy Collins is now Poet Laureate
of the United States.
He
is a very bad poet. At best, he is a very
mediocre humorist.
Billy
Collins is to good poetry what Kenny G is
to Charlie Parker; what sunset paintings at
the mall are to Jackson Pollock; what Rod
McKuen is to Walt Whitman; what Tori Spelling
is to Lana Turner; what the burkha is to lingerie;
what the Backstreet Boys are to the Beatles;
what George W. Bush is to the art of extemporaneous
speech; what Osama bin Laden is to women’s
liberation; what Dan Quayle is to spelling;
Billy Collins is to poetry what the New Age/Mysticism
section in the bookstore is to the Philosophy
section, assuming that those two sections
haven’t been conflated yet down at your
local Barnes and Noble.
I
could go on with list. But I don’t mean
to suggest that Collins is kitsch, for though
Collins may sometimes make gestures toward
kitsch, he is very much working in a quasi-high
culture mode, even if he occasionally tries
to hide the fact. Many of his poems are supposedly
witty responses to earlier famous poems (e.g.
a poem titled "Dancing Towards Bethlehem").
Collins may not be a very learned poet, but
he is not kitsch; Collins is much less interesting
than kitsch–he is strictly banal, he
wants us to know how uncomfortably banal poetry
is, and he does a very good job of making
us not want to read poetry any more. The banality
of the title of his new Selected Poems, Sailing
Alone Around the Room, pretty much says
it all. The problem is that with his newfound
prestige Collins is no longer sailing by himself.
The
dominant impression one gets when reading
a Collins poem is one of sheer lack of ambition:
| |
The
Lesson
In the morning when
I found History
snoring heavily on
the couch,
I took down his overcoat
from the rack
and placed its weight
on my shoulder blades.
It would protect me
on my cold walk
into the village for
milk and paper
and I figured he would
not mind,
not after our long
conversation the night before.
How unexpected his
blustering anger
when I returned covered with icicles,
the way he rummaged
through the huge pockets
making sure no major
battle or English queen
had fallen out and
become lost in the snow. |
There is nothing engaging
whatsoever about the construction of this
poem. The prosaic domestic setting is typical
of a Collins poem. There is in fact no specific
"History" to speak of. "History"
becomes a sort of non-threatening daydream
of some past life where things might actually
have been interesting. This is not the history
of the twentieth century, of which Joyce’s
Stephen Dedalus could say, "History is
a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."
Unlike some of his great predecessors–Dickinson,
Stevens, or Williams come to mind–Collins
is absolutely unable to make the domestic
setting into something striking, into something
beyond casual boredom. And even if Collins’
goal is to make us feel his boredom, he does
a poor job. To write interestingly of boredom
or ennui is something very few writers–and
here Beckett and Kafka come to mind–can
do well. All that Collins’ writing about
boredom does is make us feel complacent, and
perhaps a little weary. The only lesson of
the poem "The Lesson" might be that
both capital-h History and capital-p Poetry
are a kind of irrelevant nostalgia that Collins
isn’t much interested in. While capital-p
Poetry probably could use a dressing down,
Collins is hardly the person to do it.
Billy
Collins is a very bad poet, and the saddest
part is that no one will bother to say so.
It
may have been common knowledge since long
before the Romans that there is no disputing
concerning taste–but the degree of silence
from established poets and critics surrounding
Collins’ rise is remarkable (especially
the silence from ostensibly avant-garde poets
and critics). Those in the know in poetry
terms know that Collins is a bad poet–but
no one writes bad reviews of poetry books,
and Collins is no exception to the rule. The
audience for poetry is already so limited–perhaps
the argument goes–that why should we
bother to criticize Collins’ book sales?
Or maybe for some mainstream poets the argument
runs along the lines of: If I criticize Collins
then maybe he or one of his acolytes will
choose not to give me that book award the
next time I’m up for one. Or perhaps
the feeling is that it’s elitist to criticize
popular taste. But isn’t it even more
elitist and condescending to assume that the
majority of poetry readers cannot hope for
something better than Billy Collins?
The
world of contemporary American poetry may
be lamentably insular to outsiders, but it
is still capable of producing provocative,
engaging work–and the best of that work
is not designed for a coterie audience. Frank
O’Hara is an example of a poet whose
work can be extraordinarily accessible and
teachable, and yet can hardly be confused
with capital-p Poetry.
The problem with Billy
Collins is not just that he is a bad poet;
the problem is that there is a great deal
of condescension inherent in a culture of
publishers and reviewers who see no problem
with promoting this kind of dumbed-down poetry–either
actively, or by tacitly saying nothing about
its badness. When I go to the Science section
of the bookstore and buy an introductory work
for non-specialists by someone like Stephen
Hawking or Brian Greene or Stephen Jay Gould,
I will be buying a book that may not claim
to be the definitive specialist’s analysis
of the latest scientific problems–but
I will still be buying a book that is challenging
and sophisticated. On the other hand, when
someone goes into the bookstore to buy an
accessible book of poetry–if they buy
Billy Collins at least–they are being
given something entirely dull and unchallenging
that claims to be the best and most sophisticated
work of its kind, by a man who now holds the
prestigious position of Poet Laureate. If
poetry has poets like Billy Collins for its
advocates, then poetry is better off without
advocates. We might as well elect Deepak Chopra
to be our National Philosopher.
The
problem of Billy Collins, as I have said,
goes beyond Billy Collins himself. Collins
is a product of the workshop poetry culture
and oddly enough his funniest poems are those
that critique his own profession (for instance
the poem "Workshop"). There are
now 300 graduate writing programs in the U.S.
Before World War II there was one. No one
seems to know quite what to do with the immense
profusion of poetry writing. Critiques of
writing programs abound and need to be taken
seriously–but perhaps as a first step
we need to start with more honestly critiquing
poets and poetry itself. Billy Collins’
solution to his obvious dislike of his own
profession is to trivialize it. But Billy
Collins has done such a poor job of trivializing
his job that realistically he ought to have
found a different line of work long ago.
Poetry
editors, publishers, promoters, and teachers
(in both English and Creative Writing departments)
might do well to consider the gentle reminder
of Emerson in The American Scholar:
"There is creative reading as well
as creative writing." Many of the most
interesting American poets have continued
to engage with the challenging, difficult
(and often political) writing of the great
Modernist writers. The workshop poets have
by and large ignored Modernist writing and
satisfied themselves with romanticized nineteenth
century models of poetry as emotional experience
within the domestic arena. Billy Collins is
a new development for workshop poetry because
he has lowered the stakes. Billy Collins’
poems deliver the quintessential New Age message:
Relax, it’s OK to be yourself, the world
is kind and gentle and mildly amusing and
will eventually take care of you. Lyric poetry
no longer has to be emotionally intense (in
the workshop model) or intellectually stimulating
(in the avant-garde model)–it merely
needs to be mildly clever and not too discomforting.
Collins has brought bad, trivial poetry to
a new level of prestige. There is nothing
wrong with light verse–some of the greatest
poetry is light verse–but there is much
that is wrong with this kind of light verse.
We need to expect more from poets and especially
from critics, and perhaps the readers will
follow when they have something that doesn’t
lead them by the ears as if they were in need
of canned laughter. "Of American poets,"
Frank O’Hara once wrote, "only Whitman
and Williams and Crane are better than the
movies." For my part, I’ll take
a second-rate sit-com rerun over Billy Collins
any day.
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Letters to Author
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