Charming Billy
(A review of
The Trouble with Poetry by Billy Collins)
I wonder how you are going to feel
when you find out
that I wrote this instead of you
is how the first poem begins
in the new book by Billy Collins
called "The Trouble with Poetry."
It is a typical Collins beginning -
a good-natured wave
across the echoing gulf that stretches
between writer and reader,
as if to suggest
the poem itself exists
in that uncertain, cloud-strewn gap,
and we, as readers,
are very nearly poets ourselves,
even if we are unlikely
to receive recognition as such
in the form of a generous grant
from the Guggenheim Foundation,
which is not to say
we would turn one down, mind you.
Anyway, it is a tribute
to the former Poet Laureate
that he is able to make us believe,
despite our anxious response to poetry,
that we are participating
in each Billy Collins poem,
and that the humorous touches -
like calling a book of poetry
"The Trouble With Poetry" -
are a kind of knowing salute,
one writer to another.
It is a technical achievement
all too easy to underestimate,
and it involves a special sensitivity
to the nature of reading, of hearing,
which is perhaps the reason
so many Billy Collins poems
are about the process of poetry,
as when, in his poem "Workshop,"
he makes the poem itself
a history of its own unfolding,
a strategy that appears again here
in slightly altered form
as the opening to "The Introduction":
I don't think this next poem
needs any introduction -
it's best to let the work speak for itself,
a suave parody
of the nervous preambles
one hears at so many poetry readings,
and exactly the kind of beginning
that allows us to chuckle gently
as a convention is tweaked,
almost as we chuckle gently
in anticipation when we realize
that the book review we've been reading
is about to turn the corner,
and begin placing a writer's shortcomings
alongside his virtues,
by observing, for instance,
that Billy Collins too often relies
on the same blandly ironic tone
and the same conversational free verse,
loosely organized in tercets
or the occasional quatrain
when an extra line jogs onto the page,
or that his poems often begin well
and then spiral down
into unsurprising images
like exhausted birds
unable to stand for anything
beyond the simple fact of exhaustion,
or that, most important,
he is often humorous
without actually being funny,
a difference that depends largely
on a writer's willingness
to let his violent, comic sensibility
turn its knives on the reader,
on the poem,
and on poetry itself,
which may seem like an odd complaint,
given Collins's reputation
for teasing our stuffy poetic traditions.
But the teasing this writer does
is harmless, really, and contrary
to what some critics have suggested,
the problem with his work
is not that it is disrespectful,
but that it is not disrespectful enough;
it never cracks wise
to the teacher's face,
but meekly returns to its desk,
lending itself with disappointing ease
to the stale imagery
of teachers, desks and wisecracking.
In the end, what we need
from a poet with Collins's talent
is not a good-natured wave
from writer to reader,
or a literary joke, or a mild chuckle;
what we need is to be drawn
high into the poem's cloud-filled air
and allowed to fall
on rocks real enough to hurt.
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