The "Aboutness" of Poetry: A Billy Collins Manifesto

Many people have wondered about my hatred for Billy Collins. Well, like all well-worn rifts, this one started as a seamless plane: I used to love Billy. Way back, when I was at Drake and just learning about other poets, not how to critique their work, Billy was where it was the fuck at. I loved his playfulness, his clever nature, his tidy endings.

But as I got older I began to question his choices, and slowly, as the tide came in our previously impermeable beach gave way to the beginnings of that rift. Let's have a look at his "Introduction to Poetry":

Introduction to Poetry
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.

Fine. It's nice on the surface, right? "press an ear against its hive" is a nice image, a commendable line. There are lots of nice images here, but that's where it stops, see? He has this calculated build-up to the last two stanzas, where, of course, the "they" turn on this poor, defenseless poem and beat it with a hose. There are lost of things wrong with this:

1. Why indict your readers? They have done no harm to you, Billy, they just don't know how to play with poetry. Can they be blamed? Look at the state of the American public educational system for your true villain. Much like a confused child with a complicated toy, they bang it on the ground when they can't figure out how to make it light up and sing. This isn't to say readers are children, but they are "child-like" when trying to read poetry if they have no experience with it.

2. I don't know about Mr. Collins, but I never send my poems out defenseless: it's called tension, Billy, and most of your poems lack it: there's no surprises, no push and pull to hold them together. There's no complications, no questions asked of the reader to get them to think before they act, and that's the writer's fault. No wonder your poems get assaulted, it's a harsh world out there, BC: if your poems can't take it, they only have one person to look for to place blame, and it's surely not the readers.

3. This gripe is more for the critics, the stay-at-home poets who like to tidy up the whole business and make labels and order us into boxes. They are constantly putting James Tate and Billy Collins in the same bracket. This pisses me off, mainly because the janitors of our genre, who claim to be so careful and concerned with the proper placement of us against each other, would then make so sloppy and grievous an error. Let's look at one of Jim's poems:

It Happens Like This

  I was outside St. Cecelia's Rectory
smoking a cigarette when a goat appeared beside me.
It was mostly black and white, with a little reddish
brown here and there. When I started to walk away,
it followed. I was amused and delighted, but wondered
what the laws were on this kind of thing. There's
a leash law for dogs, but what about goats? People
smiled at me and admired the goat. "It's not my goat,"
I explained. "It's the town's goat. I'm just taking
my turn caring for it." "I didn't know we had a goat,"
one of them said. "I wonder when my turn is." "Soon,"
I said. "Be patient. Your time is coming." The goat
stayed by my side. It stopped when I stopped. It looked
up at me and I stared into its eyes. I felt he knew
everything essential about me. We walked on. A police-
man on his beat looked us over. "That's a mighty
fine goat you got there," he said, stopping to admire.
"It's the town's goat," I said. "His family goes back
three-hundred years with us," I said, "from the beginning."
The officer leaned forward to touch him, then stopped
and looked up at me. "Mind if I pat him?" he asked.
"Touching this goat will change your life," I said.
"It's your decision." He thought real hard for a minute,
and then stood up and said, "What's his name?" "He's
called the Prince of Peace," I said. "God! This town
is like a fairy tale. Everywhere you turn there's mystery
and wonder. And I'm just a child playing cops and robbers
forever. Please forgive me if I cry." "We forgive you,
Officer," I said. "And we understand why you, more than
anybody, should never touch the Prince." The goat and
I walked on. It was getting dark and we were beginning
to wonder where we would spend the night.

Jim starts out doing the same thing Billy does, uses the same poetic structure in that they both begin by recounting an event. But Jim's poem has tension: multiple voices where Billy relied on an amorphous "they," Jim has questions where Billy has pat answers. Jim's poems frequently end, like this example also does, with a beginning where Billy's poems end, as his example does, in a way that traps the reader, doesn't allow us any way to move except out of the poem. Essentially, Billy ends where Jim would just be getting started. I recognize this position may just be a side effect from working with Jim, but really I'm not the only one who notices the transparency of Collins' work. Many people find that transparency refreshing, I do not.

Poetry for me has always been about possibility, about questions where other literary forms tried to give me answers. Billy doesn't want me to think, he wants me to listen, and I'm not interested in being told about an introduction to poetry. I'm interested in being asked about the possibilities of the introduction(s) to poetry.

No hard feelings, huh Billy? I just needed more. It's not me, it's you. Maybe poetry just isn't your thing, maybe construction of things that don't move is for you, things more stable than poetry, maybe you could be a load bearing post? As you appear to be enjoying here:



Am I being snarky? Yes, of course, just a little, but give me a break, huh? I work in an art form that has the widespread credibility of pantomiming. But I think all this racket raises an important issue: Billy makes a point about the state of poetry. Of course poems are misunderstood and under-read and well, irrelevant for most of society. But how can people outside penetrate into this world when we continually berate them for not "getting it" and then, out of frustration, they become (understandably if not beneficially) belligerent. I'm a fucking poet, for God's sake, with a degree that claims I am a "Master" of it, and I don't get it half the time. The other side of the poetry spectrum from Billy's paint-by-numbers, 1-2-3 poetry we find L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E POETRY. Come the fuck on! I'm trying to be respectful and I love Lyn Hejinian as much as the next red-blooded poetry enthusiast, but how does 86 semi-colons in a row make a poem? It's looks like the fucking page my printer shits out when I get an new ink cartridge. Alright, this post is getting ugly and unwieldy and must end: let's have a truce, shall we?

I will stop bitching about Billy Collins when his poems ask the reader to do more than read them, and we poets will make more of an effort to write "decipherable" poems (but we're a bit sore about the request, see, I can't even write the word without putting it in quotes) when more people than the poets themselves begin reading their work.

Fair?