No one understands life more than Billy Collins

Thanks for letting me borrow this Constance. I have lots of new favorite poems marked in this book. I now want to read all the charming wit that is Billy Collins.

I went through a few stages while reading through this book of poetry (which is not my thing, as the kids say.) To start, I very much enjoyed Billy Collins's down-to-earth style and his wit and charm. But as I got into his later poems, and I began to get annoyed by a certain level of pretension, where a poem would start out simple and then escalate to something grandiose. But then I started to appreciate his progressive stream of consciousness that he could put down in his writing. I've never understood what made poetry special (as a medium and a form of art), but after reading Collins I could appreciate the abstract thought trail of his poetry, which is often how my own thought trails work.

Thx u mister Austin Spence for letting me steal your books before u read

Utterly delightful.

my boyfriend gave me this with my birthday presents, i’m so glad he did. beautiful!!!!

Walking Across the Atlantic

I wait for the holiday crowd to clear the beach
before stepping onto the first wave.

Soon I am walking across the Atlantic
thinking about Spain,
checking for whales, waterspouts.

I feel the water holding up my shifting weight.
Tonight I will sleep on its rocking surface.

But for now I try to imagine what
this must look like to the fish below,
the bottoms of my feet appearing, disappearing.




Collins in 2015


Billy Collins was born in Manhattan in 1941, received a BA degree from Holy Cross (Worchester MA) in 1963, and attended the University of California, Riverside, earning MA and PhD degrees in Romantic Poetry. He joined the faculty of Lehman College in the Bronx in 1968 and taught there for over thirty years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Co...

Collins served as Poet Laureate of the U.S. from 2001 to 2003. During his term Collins created a program called Poetry 180, in which high schools were supplied with a selection (by him) of 180 poems, one for each day of the school year. (The poem for the first day, Introduction to Poetry (1988) is in the book under review here, and is quoted below. It’s the only Collins poem in the 180 collection. See http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/p180-ho....) The position is officially Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. The Poet Laureate “is appointed annually by the Librarian of the U.S. Congress and serves from October to May”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_S... “During his or her term, the Poet Laureate seeks to raise the national consciousness to a greater appreciation of the reading and writing of poetry.” Most recent Poet Laureates have served either one or two terms.

Sixteen collections of Collins’ poetry have been published, the first in 1977 and the most recent The Rain in Portugal in 2016. Sailing Alone Around the Room, published in 2002, includes selections from four of his earlier collections, plus twenty “new” poems. (Like most poets, many of Collins’ poems are initially published in magazines. Of the new poems in this book, many had been published in The Atlantic Monthly and Poetry.)


Billy Collins as Poet

Collins’ audience includes many people (like myself) who are not habitual poetry readers. [But now I've become one - or at least am on my way to becoming one.]

He writes poems about subjects that are easily understood, and completely familiar, to almost anyone - yet says things about those subjects different from what most of us would normally say. And even if we did try to say the same things, we wouldn’t come up with the words that Collins does – though not because we don’t know the words. Collins’ poetry is probably not really different in kind from many contemporary poets – he just does it better.

I've chosen one poem from each of the five sections of the book.

From his 1988 collection n  The Apple That Polished Parisn, there are at least five others  - Insomnia, Books, Bar Time, Schoolsville and especially The Brooklyn Museum of Art - that I’d like to quote, but I’ve promised above this one, which would otherwise be my second or third choice.

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 water-ski
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.

Yes, drop a mouse into a poem! This could generate a lot of discussion not only about reading a poem, but about writing a poem also – couldn’t it?


From the 1991 collection n  Questions About Angelsn, there are four that I enjoyed most – the title poem, The Death of Allegory, Forgetfulness and this one.

First Reader

I can see them standing politely on the wide pages
that I was still learning to turn,
Jane in a blue jumper, Dick with his crayon-brown hair,
playing with a ball or exploring the cosmos
of the backyard, unaware they are the first characters,
the boy and girl who begin fiction.

Beyond the simple illustration of their neighborhood
the other protagonists were waiting in a huddle:
frightening Heathcliff, frightened Pip, Nick Adams
carrying a fishing rod, Emma Bovary riding into Rouen.

But I would read about the perfect boy and his sister
even before I would read about Adam and Eve, garden and gate,
and before I heard the name Gutenberg, the type
of their simple talk was moving into my focusing eyes.

It was always Saturday and he and she
were always pointing at something and shouting “Look!”
pointing at the dog, the bicycle, or at their father
as he pushed a hand mower over the lawn,
waving at aproned Mother framed in the kitchen doorway,
pointing toward the sky, pointing at each other.

They wanted us to look but we had looked already
and seen the shaded lawn, the wagon, the postman.
We had seen the dog, walked, watered, and fed the animal,
and now it was time to discover the infinite, clicking
permutations of the alphabet’s small and capital letters.
Alphabetical ourselves in the rows of classroom desks,
we were forgetting how to look, learning how to read.

Wow. What an evocation of childhood, and a description of the reading road that we travel in life - from the boy and girl who begin fiction to those clicking permutations of the alphabet, with the characters to be encountered waiting in a huddle … It occurs to me that readers here from outside the U.S. may miss some of the meaning. If so, this might help – Fun With Dick and Jane.


From n  The Art of Drowningn (1995), this is the shortest of the eight to ten poems that said something to me.

Center

At the first chink of sunrise,
the windows on one side of the house
are frosted with stark orange light,

and in every pale blue window
on the other side
a full moon hangs, a round, white blaze.

I look out one side, then the other,
moving from room to room
as if between countries or parts of my life.

Then I stop and stand in the middle,
extend both arms
like Leonardo’s man, naked in a perfect circle.

And when I begin to turn slowly
I can feel the whole house turning with me,
rotating free of the earth.

The sun and moon in all the windows
move, too, with the tips of my fingers,
the solar system turning by degrees

with me, mornings’s egomaniac,
turning on the hallway carpet in my slippers,
taking the cold orange, blue, and white

for a quiet, unhurried spin,
all wheel and compass, axis and reel,
as wide awake as I will ever be.


And from n  Picnic, Lightningn (1998), which has at least fifteen poems that I would gladly showcase here, I’ve chosen this one, composed of tiny two line stanzas, almost like miniature haiku – utterly at one with the poem’s subject.

Bonsai

All it takes is one to throw a room
completely out of whack.

Over by the window
it looks hundreds of yards away,

a lone stark gesture of wood
on the distant cliff of a table.

Up close, it draws you in,
cuts everything down to its size.

Look at it from the doorway,
and the world dilates and bloats.

The button lying next to it
is now a pearl wheel,

the book of matches is a raft,
and the coffee cup a cistern

to catch the same rain
that moistens its small plot of dark, mossy earth.

For it even carries its own weather,
leaning away from a fierce wind

that somehow blows
through the calm tropics of this room.

The way it bends inland at the elbow
makes me want to inch my way

to the very top if its spiky greenery,
hold on for dear life

and watch the sea storm rage,
hoping for a tiny whale to appear.

I want to see her plunging forward
through the troughs,

tunneling under the foam and spindrift
on her annual, thousand-mile journey.


Finally, from the last section of new poems, I’ll just take the first one, about the author’s dog, who appears often in the poems, in none of them in a more exalted guise than here.

Dharma

The way the dog trots out the front door
every morning
without a hat or an umbrella,
without any money
or the keys to her doghouse
never fails to fill the saucer of my heart
with milky admiration.

Who provides a finer example
of a life without encumbrance –
Thoreau in his curtainless hut
with a single plate, a single spoon?
Gandhi with his staff and his holy diapers?

Off she goes into the material world
with nothing but her brown coat
and her modest blue collar,
following only her wet nose,
the twin portals of her steady breathing,
followed only by the plume of her tail.

If only she did not shove the cat aside
every morning
and eat all his food
what a model of self-containment she would be,
what a paragon of earthly detachment.
If only she were not so eager
for a rub behind the ears,
so acrobatic in her welcomes,
if only I were not her god.

(Exalted until that last stanza, that is. Then the poet acknowledges that maybe he's been taking her a little too seriously. She does have her downside. And of course occasionally she's a wet dog, and nobody has much anything good to say about a wet dog ... as Collins points out in a poem called To a Stranger Born in Some Distant Country Hundreds of Years from Now.)

So there you have it, a small selction of the poems that I liked. There were two or three others that had me laughing near-hysterically, but I felt that my sense of the absurd might not match others’. But then, why should I suppose that these particular poems will touch others the way they did me? Obviously they won’t. There were many I wish I had chosen instead. But I would say the same, no matter which I had chosen.

I wish that each person who read this, and thought they would like some of Collins’ poems in here, could sit with me for a couple hours, and find some poems that we both thought were fun – whether of the poet’s house, his dog, poems about listening to music, funny poems, poems about serious topics (death, growing old, receding from the things one loves). Just to find a few that we both could sign off on “yes those are good ones”. And then remember that set for each of the people, all those different sets of poems which we both liked, would define in some way the pieces of poetic sensibility that we shared.



. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Previous review: New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract
Next review: History of Art Janson
Older review: State of the World 2013

Previous library review: Ender's Game Card
Next library review: The Manchurian Candidate Condon

So most of these positive reviews start something like, "I know nothing about poetry." For what it's worth, I do. But yeah, that is okay if you don't. But then those same reviews go on to make claims, almost all unsupported and weak if not, that Collins is doing something impressive here. Bringing poetry to the common man and that. If he succeeds, then it is with a lower opinion of the common man than I have.

There are good, maybe great, poems here. Look them up on the Internet and skip the book. On turning 10 and introduction to poetry and questions about Angels.

The most efficient and impossibly brutal burn of this book is the popular highlights on kindle. Rather than coming from the poems, they are all of the blurbs telling you how good the poems are. Shaking my head.

"I am wondering what became of all those tall abstractions
that used to pose, robed and statuesque, in paintings
and parade about on the pages of the Renaissance
displaying their capital letters like license plates."

- from "The Death of Allegory"

Billy Collins is the master jazz flute player of poetry. His touch is so exquisitely light, his sound so modest and calm, that you can miss the depth of what he's doing.

My friend Adam Fites sent this collection to me for Christmas. I had read Nine Horses in December of 2015, and while its tone and humor were impeccable, I didn't find much of the depth or texture that gives my favorite poetry traction.

Sailing Alone Around the Room, being a collection collected from other collections, was to my eye, a far superior collection. Collins's calm, winking eye is at work all over the place, but there are poems here about pain, grief, passing time, and precise moments that become so musical or true as to feel spiritual.

My favorites included "My Number," "The Dead," "The History Teacher," "Japan," and "Taking off Emily Dickinson's Clothes."

We locate an adjective for the weather.
We announce that we are having a wonderful time.
We express the wish that you were here

and hide the wish that we were where you are,
walking back from the mailbox, your head lowered
as you read and turn the thin message in your hands.

A slice of this place, a length of white beach,
a piazza or carved spires of a cathedral
will pierce the familiar place where you remain,

and you will toss on the table this reversible display:
a few square inches of where we have strayed
and a compression of what we feel.
-from "American Sonnet"

In fairness, I should probably not have given Mr. Collins his second chance while I was taking a break from Marlon James' Black Leopard, Red Wolf, giving that man's words the space and rest to hurt me really properly. Nor should I have picked up this small volume immediately after finishing Roz Chast's meditation on her parents' dying days in Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?. But I have thirteen books out from the library and this seemed an easy one to get off the stack, and I really did need a break from Mr. James' wonderful-so-far book. So that is the state of your humble reviewer, a caveat in case any of you commit the folly of taking my not always humble opinion into account in what you read. Another caveat would be that when I find myself wishing a not so fond 'fuck you' to the poet in the midst of multiple poems, I think it best for all involved if I stop. Hence the DNF.

What has poor Mr. Collins done to earn such an impolite response? Perhaps not so much, besides waste my time and his. His poems are, after all, workmanlike examples of the craft, harmless meditations on teaching, chopping wood, the nature of reading and poetry, his parents deaths, all the waitpersons he's ever met and their someday deaths, and such. It's just that there's poetry for the sake of constructing a poem, issuing a musing (very like writing a postcard, I freely admit!), and then there's living a poem, tearing the words out of the desolation of life and death and bleeding them, sweating them into the shape of flame. To put it a different way, my very favorite poet right now is a stewardess who pours her struggles with identity, love, and her mother into beautiful burning meditations on her Tumblr, and her least trope would set Mr. Collins on fire. She won't ever be poet laureate. I doubt she'd even want to. She probably won't ever have a book of collected poems for me to set my five shining stars on. Maybe she wouldn't want that either. But I am the tiniest bit bitter about it.

Anyway, Mr. Collins and his poems are not horrible. He has his moments. (I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves,/straining in circles of light to find more light is brilliant! If only the rest of the poem were as good! A whole book of that, I would gladly crown with starlight!) But on the whole, if you want poetry, find you some real poetry. This is just postcards from where poetry is supposed to live.

I was just going through old books to donate and came across this. I thought, "Oh, this turd's definitely getting itself donated." I remembered Collins as being proudly dull, writing almost exclusively about writing poems, and trying to trick you into thinking that every rudimentary action was a profound moment.

As I flipped through the soon-to-be-donated book, hoping to find a lost hundred, a girl's phone number, or something as good/forgotten as the poetry was bad/forgotten, I found a series of notes I'd left for Collins.

They began simply enough: "Is this meant to make me dislike you?"; "Ok, but why bother with line breaks?"; and "Blech." But the more I'd read, the less I'd been able to contain myself. It got pretty bad at times. By turns I wished Collins physical harm, emotional distress, and continued balding. That wasn't nice. I know that now. But here's some of it again anyway, in medias res:

From Afternoon with Irish Cows

Then I knew that she was only announcingt
the large, unadulterated cowness of herself

[You know, Collins, it might not be you and your terrible poetry I hate. It might be that all any poet writes about is cowness. They just hide it better.]

---

From "Some Days"

Some days I put the people in their places at the table,
bend their legs at the knees,
if they come with that feature,
and fix them into the tiny wooden chairs.

. . . But other days, I am the one
who is lifted up by the ribs . . .

[I actually don't doubt that this is you playing with dolls and, what? Comparing it to God?]

- - -

From Taking off Emily Dickinson's Clothestt

[Lord.]

---

From The Death of the Hat

Once every man wore a hat.

[Really rising above the mundane now]

Hats were the law.
They went without saying.

[If this is another "it's all downhill from here" poems, and all just for hats, I swear . . .]

And now my father, after a life of work,
wears a hat of earth,
and on top of that,
a lighter one of cloud and sky - a hat of wind.

[Are you fucking serious? A hat of earth? I cannot believe you are the Poet Laureate.]

---

From I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey's Version of 'Three Blind Mice'

[Yay!]

---

From Pardelle for Susan

I remember the quick, nervous bird of your love.tt
I remember the quick, nervous bird of your love.

[Oh for fuck's sake.]

---

From Marginalia

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page . . .

[hmmm . . .]


. . . Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in "The Life of Emily Dickinson".

[You clearly anticipated this.]

We have all seized the white perimeter as our ownt
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages.

[I feel an insult coming on.]

. . . anonymous men catching a ride into the futurett
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

[Yep.]

---

From Idiomatic

. . . and sometimes rockets lift off in the distance -
and I mean that quite literally

[Oh, do you? Quite?]

---

From Dharma

The way the dog trots out the front doorttt
every morning
without a hat or an umbrella,
without any money
or the keys to her doghouse
never fails to fill the saucer of my heart
with milky admiration.

[Holy fucking puke-fest.]

---

From Sonnet

All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now

---

Anyhoo, let this be a record of my disdain. If I'm anonymous here, it's only because I don't want to hitch a ride on this shitty vessel.

I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves,
straining in circles of light to find more light

a long list of favorites: books, the wires of the night, the dead, my number, introduction to poetry, another reason why i don’t keep a gun in the house, marginalia, japan, victoria’s secret, lines composed over three thousand miles from tintern abbey