I didn’t mention in my readings roundup this morning* that Billy Collins is reading at Elliott Bay Book Company tonight. I didn’t mention this because Billy Collins writes garbage poetry, and there are several other neat book-related events for you to attend tonight. But I just got an e-mail from a local poet that read, basically**:
Can’t you conjure one of those flash mob things to have the public meet at the Billy Collins reading at 7 and heckle him for 15 seconds, then split?
Well, Local Poet, here’s the thing: I hate Billy Collins. I wish Billy Collins would stop publishing books. In the readings calendar, I jokingly said that his “run as U.S. Poet Laureate was one of the darkest days in the history of western civilization,” but there was some truth to that; Collins’ poetry is facile and lame and populist in the very worst way, and his Laureateship was a desperate sop to try to get people interested in poetry, somehow. But that’s the cool-teacher approach to literature, and the cool-teacher approach to literature almost never works. You can’t just give the public what you think the public wants when it comes to arts; you have to challenge them, and make them want to rise to meet your challenge.
While I admit that on some level, I think it would be funny and entertaining to come together and mock Billy Collins as a group, I think it’d be better if you just went to one of the other, better readings in town tonight instead. Let the literary star-fuckers*** show up and swoon over Collins. There’ll be fewer of them every time he comes to town, and eventually, nobody will care about Billy Collins any more. Paying attention to him—which actually requires paying less attention to worthier events—will only keep him in the spotlight that much longer.
* The Collins reading is in our readings calendar, of course, because we list every Seattle-area reading in the readings calendar. But on Slog, I only list the readings that I think are especially worth your attention.
** This poet often writes e-mails without capital letters or punctuation, so I edited the e-mail for clarity’s sake.
*** Yes, there are literary star-fuckers, and no, it is never a pretty sight.
Paul… Paul… *shakes head sadly* Jen dissing Rockwell, I get. But you vs. Collins? For the love of God, why? And if you’re going to bold “garbage poetry,” at least link to an article or reference or think piece or something to back up your grumpiness.
“Collins’ poetry is facile and lame”
I agree. BC is to poetry as PC is to good writing. Pretentious prick.
You know who doesn’t use capital letters or punctuation? Pretentious people who can’t write. And ee cummings.
@3 or people who have iPads or iPhones and hate the location of Shift.
well, at least they got the poet laureate right with Kay Ryan. that’s all i’m saying.
@3 …but you repeat yourself.
Sorry, but I love Billy Collins. He writes in images that stay in my head and with me. He made my 14 year old son “get poetry”.
“You can’t just give the public what you think the public wants when it comes to arts; you have to challenge them, and make them want to rise to meet your challenge.”
This phrase is literary snobbishness. First, you are assigning the author motives and a method for what he writes. I would challenge you to show us how you know that his intention is to give the public what they want? Secondly, that sentence reads as if you have a certain contempt for the poetry reading public is they aren’t “rising” to your level of acceptability.
Secondly, why is accessibility a bad thing? Is it possible to love a poem that you have to “rise” to and also love a poem whose language draws you easily in but whose ideas make you look at the world just a little differently than we did before? Or, are we only allowed to admire something that is dense and difficult? Should I measure poetry by that standard? The more inaccessable, the better is it?
I realize that this was not an actual review, simply some off the cuff statements by a man I admire about a poet that I also admire. But, it was a little too simplistic, a little too dismissive for my taste.
Jackie
Please, everyone knows Seattleites are way too passive to have the guts to do anything like this ever.
Osso Buco
I love the sound of the bone against the plate
and the fortress-like look of it
lying before me in a moat of risotto,
the meat soft as the leg of an angel
who has lived a purely airborne existence.
And best of all, the secret marrow,
the invaded privacy of the animal
prized out with a knife and swallowed down
with cold, exhilarating wine.
I am swaying now in the hour after dinner,
a citizen tilted back on his chair,
a creature with a full stomach–
something you don’t hear much about in poetry,
that sanctuary of hunger and deprivation.
you know: the driving rain, the boots by the door,
small birds searching for berries in winter.
But tonight, the lion of contentment
has placed a warm heavy paw on my chest,
and I can only close my eyes and listen
to the drums of woe throbbing in the distance
and the sound of my wife’s laughter
on the telephone in the next room,
the woman who cooked the savory osso buco,
who pointed to show the butcher the ones she wanted.
She who talks to her faraway friend
while I linger here at the table
with a hot, companionable cup of tea,
feeling like one of the friendly natives,
a reliable guide, maybe even the chief’s favorite son.
Somewhere, a man is crawling up a rocky hillside
on bleeding knees and palms, an Irish penitent
carrying the stone of the world in his stomach;
and elsewhere people of all nations stare
at one another across a long, empty table.
But here, the candles give off their warm glow,
the same light that Shakespeare and Izaac Walton wrote by,
the light that lit and shadowed the faces of history.
Only now it plays on the blue plates,
the crumpled napkins, the crossed knife and fork.
In a while, one of us will go up to bed
and the other will follow.
Then we will slip below the surface of the night
into miles of water, drifting down and down
to the dark, soundless bottom
until the weight of dreams pulls us lower still,
below the shale and layered rock,
beneath the strata of hunger and pleasure,
into the broken bones of the earth itself,
into the marrow of the only place we know.
Billy Collins,
The Art of Drowning
You don’t make yourself look better, or smarter, by tearing down a “popular” artist. It is too easy and meaningless, and only validates the opinions of those who already agree with you. You are not going to sway the views of the many, many readers who like Collins (or at least don’t hate him or find him facile), in fact, you may just alienate them from looking at the other writers that you have mentioned.
This annoys the crap out of me. I’m with 7 on this. Can’t reasonably intelligent people who are able to catch a few sly references and enjoy the sonic effect of language be allowed to enjoy poetry without it being dismissed as childish or facile? It’s kind of like the tax code: you ought to be able to work with it and not get angrier the longer you spend with it.
Paul, you used to recommend the odd book–howzabout you point out A (one) tome that will enable those of us who weren’t lit majors to appreciate poetry at something approaching your exalted level? I know true crap when I hear it–Collins was on “Talk of the Nation” today and one of the callers read entirely through some bit of rhymy doggerel he composed without anybody having the heart to stop him. I think puzzle solving and poetry should be two different things, and I don’t think a “good” poem should require a one-semester class and prior reading of five different biographies of the artiste in order to understand it. A bit of explication that doesn’t exceed the actual poem in length is okay.
Strange, strange stuff, Paul. In a world where poetry as a published literary form teeters on the edge, I can’t fathom why you would attack any poet. And what a harsh critique, “garbage”. What poetry is ever garbage, whether written by a child or an idiot? It’s all good… it’s all poetry.
Goddamn, Paul. I don’t read that much poetry, but I also don’t consider myself stupid, and I’ve quite liked the 10 or so poems I’ve ready by Collins.
Can you be troubled to briefly explain why this guy is such an unforgivable stain? Is there some particularly egregious shit he did or said? Or do you just think his verse is…pretentious? Lazy? What’s the deal?
I rescued a Billy Collins collection, The Apple That Astonished Paris from The Spine and Crown a few months ago. When I read the above SLOG post I read three of its poems, to see if Paul Constant’s opinion had any weight as an argument, because many times an opinion is just an opinion. I then read three poems from Wendy Cope’s Serious Concerns as a countermeasure.
I don’t know much about the current quality of American poetry. I do know that anthologies I’ve read within this past year do have better poems than what are in The Apple That Astonished Paris. Facile and populist can be digestible, lame rarely. I do know that Paul is not dismissing accessible poetry. People new to verse like gentle introductions, but they don’t have to be subjected to doggerel. My poetry introduction was A Child’s Garden of Verses, the children I tutor like poems they get intrinsically, be they offerings from Shel Silverstein, Jack Prelutsky, Dennis Lee, Edward Lear or Lewis Carroll. If I were new to poetry now I’d probably go with Ezra Pound or Neal Cassady or Diane DiPrima.
May I recommend Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled for a wonderful entry to accessible, enjoyable verse for the tenderfoot?
The last time Billy Collins read in Seattle was in November, the night of the biggest blizzard Seattle has had in twenty years. And guess what? HUNDREDS of people showed up to hear Billy Collins read his poetry. And guess what? Those who couldn’t make it because of the storm DEMANDED the chance to see Collins again– which is not what he’s doing there tonight. But Collins will be back after tonight to satisfy those poetry lovers. And his crowd won’t dwindle each time, however much you wish that might be so. It grows. And so does the readership of poetry, thanks to Collins.
Out of the living poets laureate, who was asked to write the introduction to the Poets Laureate Anthology that was published last fall? Billy Collins. And he did an excellent job.
Which book is #1 on amazon’s bestseller list right this minute? HOROSCOPES FOR THE DEAD, the Billy Collins book that was released yesterday.
So, yeah, Paul, a flash mob will be showing up at the BC reading tonight, but not because of you, and not to heckle him. They’ll be there to hear the man read his poems. He’s the rockstar of poetry. And he will be for a long, long time.
The last time Billy Collins read in Seattle was in November, the night of the biggest blizzard Seattle has had in twenty years. And guess what? HUNDREDS of people showed up to hear Billy Collins read his poetry. And guess what? Those who couldn’t make it because of the storm DEMANDED the chance to see Collins again– which is not what he’s doing there tonight. But Collins will be back after tonight to satisfy those poetry lovers. And his crowd won’t dwindle each time, however much you wish that might be so. It grows. And so does the readership of poetry, thanks to Collins.
Out of the living poets laureate, who was asked to write the introduction to the Poets Laureate Anthology that was published last fall? Billy Collins. And he did an excellent job.
Which book is #1 on amazon’s bestseller list right this minute? HOROSCOPES FOR THE DEAD, the Billy Collins book that was released yesterday.
So, yeah, Paul, a flash mob will be showing up at the BC reading tonight, but not because of you, and not to heckle him. They’ll be there to hear the man read his poems. He’s the rockstar of poetry. And he will be for a long, long time.
I like Billy Collins. I didn’t know that made me a drooling idiot.
i have been put off by “articles” I have read before on the Slog. Writers seem to use it as a venue to air their ire or vaunt a sort of holier than though position. Tonight’s small minded rant by P. Constant seemed to scale a new zenith in such posturing.Billy Collins is a poet who celebrates the every day experience and small moments. His poetry is Deliberately open and frequently approaches its subject with wry humor. As a Cool teacher,I am grateful for his accessibility and his quirky way of allowing almost anyone,by that I mean the few anyones who attempt to read poetry ever,to see the world in a fresh sense. Poetry is hard and its complexity can stop a reader from wanting to explore what it has to offer.Teaching anyone to relax with it,let alone embrace it and shuffle through its beauty is a struggle. That said,there is much room in the glorious world of words. The Italian sonnet can easily share space with someone thinking about a red wheel barrow or a poet who hears”America singing.”Simplicity is not rubbish and erudite complexity is not necessarily literary gold.Poetry has room for both the Billy Collins and T.S.Elliots. As a Cool teacher who spent 35 years helping kids enjoy the the special nuance poetry brings to anyone who”lives in a pretty how town I am damn glad.
I love Billy Collins! There are hardly any poets I can say that about. I don’t care if that makes me an idiot — I’m reading Boneshaker right now and am enjoying it too. Not every work has to be Dostoyevsky to be of value.
I first became aware of Billy Collins from the poem “Litany,” which isn’t really poetic but I did find it hilarious. I ended up liking a lot of his other more sincere poems. I do have a collection of his that I find boring — but two others I like a lot.
Here’s Litany:
http://www.billy-collins.com/2005/06/lit…
@14, thanks for the recommendations. I like Stephen Fry.
Forming a flash mob to heckle a writer you don’t like is an a rather assholish think to do–I’d say on par with those writers who attack their critics on Amazon or wherever.
A poet’s work resonates with me best – or not – when I hear the poet read his or her work. Every time I hear Collins read (never in person, but several times on various radio shows), I think, “This guy is not a poet. He’s a cleverer-than-average stand-up comedian.” I just don’t find any great insights in his poetry (and yes, I have read them on the page, too). I think he is so popular because he is easy to “get'” and I guess that does make me something of a snob. But Charles Simic is pretty easy to “get” too (in my opinion), and I love his poetry. To me, there is something deeper and richer about Simic’s work that strikes the right chord. Collins, not so much.
@22: That’s cool, you don’t like his work. But somehow you don’t feel the need to “hate” him and to write off his many fans as the poetry equivalents of Justin Bieber fans.
This “if it’s popular it must suck” meme gets old fast.
@23 I agree that that meme gets old, and there are plenty of pop culture things I adore. I would never heckle a poet (nor anyone else, with exceptions for Dick Cheney and the Phelps WBC clan). I would love for Paul to clarify exactly what he meant by Collins’ poetry being “populist in the very worst way” (or did I miss that explanation?).
Having said all that, I do change the station now if I am listening to something on which Collins makes an appearance. I’ve heard enough to last me a lifetime.
Also – the fact that Paul’s post has generated discussion about poetry AT ALL is a blessing in disguise. Maybe that’s not so unusual for you Seattle-ites, but way over here ‘cross the country in itsy bitsy Rhode Island, such discussions rarely happen in the general press (alternative, blog, or otherwise).
Why heckle Billy Collins (meh) when you could go listen to Gina Ochsner for free on the same night?
We are so spoiled w/ readings here in Seattle. I loe it.
Some of us have different palates. I like Neruda for many of the same reasons I like Collins. He too was dismissed for not being pretentious enough. I think Collins would agree with Neruda, that poetry “should be like bread: food for the masses.”
And another thing bud. As a “cool teacher” I challenge the hell out of my kids. What makes me cool is that I don’t condescend to them or act like I’m the patron saint of what makes good poetry. But that is what you seem to be doing.