Collins and Contemporary Poetry

The poetry club that I advise is planning a trip to a lecture by Billy Collins next week, so I've been trying to expose them to some of Collins's poetry and to some of the ideas surrounding his work.

In an effort to get them to write a bit about their own responses to his poetry--or, at least, to the four of his poems I've assigned them to read--I've pointed them to the recent review of Collins's new book in the New York Times and, for purposes of contrast, to a paragraph from John Gallher's blog.

You see where this is headed, of course. It's got me thinking about my own reactions to Collins and his work.

First, I think it's important to separate the two, or at least to separate Collins's work as poet laureate from his work as a poet. As a high school teacher, or rather, as a writer who also teaches high school, I was encouraged by the work he did with the Poetry 180 project. State testing has done a lot of harm in the teaching of what we might broadly call the arts, and Collins's pet project is a (small) help in fighting that battle, providing an accessible poem for each of the 180 days that American high schools are in session each year.

Of course, we have to ignore the often trite suggestions for reading that often accompany the poems. Forrest Hamer's poem "Lesson" comes with the heading, "This is a father and son poem." Louis Jenkins's "Football" gets the headnote, "Here's a moment of sports confusion for you." The italicized text preceding David Ignatow's "For my Daughter" lets us know that "Here a father speaks to his daughter." And so on.

We have to ignore these, reminding ourselves that the fact remains that there are teachers and students who don't have easy access to collections of poetry, and that this project brings at least poetry to them, free of charge. And it's difficult to see that as anything but good.

And perhaps these simple headnotes are a suitable metaphor for Collins's own work. It is, above all else, accessible, even to people who wouldn't describe themselves as readers of poetry. It is also snide at times, allowing readers to feel a bit holier-than-thou at the expense of Emily Dickinson. Or some Victoria's Secret models. Or some blind mice.

But Collins's poems never have the magic, to my ear, of the work of some of his contemporaries. His poems seem to work so hard at being accessible to a reader who isn't willing to work too hard at metaphor that they fail to explore the moment with the fullness of being that I see in Li-Young Lee's work, or with the level of abstraction (or the playfulness of language) that drives some of Beth Ann Fennelly's work--especially her early collection Open House.

But this is also what is good about Collins's poems. His better work uses the everyday, the experience that is accessible to all or most of us, to get at something bigger. Consider, for instance, this bit from the title poem of his collection Picnic, Lightning:

This is what I think about
when I shovel compost
into a wheelbarrow,
and when I fill the long flower boxes,
then press into rows
the limp roots of red impatiens--
the instant hand of Death
always ready to burst forth
from the sleeve of his voluminous cloak.

Then the soil is full of marvels,
bits of leaf like flakes off a fresco,
red-brown pine needles, a beetle quick
to burrow back under the loam.
Then the wheelbarrow is a wilder blue,
the clouds a brighter white, . . .

A common enough poetic theme, but well executed, especially given the source of the poem's title. But it's missing the desperation and wonder that this moment must, in my experience, contain. Collins comes off as professional and even professorial here, but professional and professorial misses the note that better poems capture--he sounds like your grandfather telling you a life lesson, but the fatigue in the lines makes the lesson less than convincing. The poem's speaker seems old, and I find him no more engaged with his world than he was when the poem begins, and he ends the poem "as one hour sweeps into the next."

That's all for now. I'm going to go cook some soup.