Billy Collins, Curator of Convivial Verse Vivifies Port. Slyly.

The advice Billy Collins gives prospective poets is to read and read and read – until something speaks to them.

There are several problems with this advice. For one thing, poetry typically demands around two kilos of study for every kilo of reading. But another problem arises when these prospective practitioners of ars poetica encounter Collins’ poetry: there’s a significant chance that he’ll have them eating, or rather, reading out of his hand.

Trouble is, Collins is a master of accessibility, or rather, the sheen of accessibility. Not only will readers be tempted to end their A-to-Z search at “Collins,” but they might well have been tricked into doing so. Should they stop parsing his poems once Collins’ humor has planted a gentle smile on their faces, they’ll miss a layer or two of the cupcake the poet has baked.

One of his tricks is to advise readers not to work so hard at it. As the poet writes in “Introduction to Poetry,”

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.

But of course a modest beating or two might be needed to perceive, and thus avoid, the Trojans his poetry can deliver.

To Envy Is to See

Deep into his reading, Collins made wry reference to the “unreliable narrator.” It occurred to this listener, now well into his fourth Collins event, that the poet is at his best when, like a calm companion offering a hemlock-laden potion tasting very much like milk, the listener is lulled into a lightweight, half-distracted listen.

One of his tricks can now be disclosed. Consider conjoining lines like these: “It was then, in the fading light . . . “ and “If all that were not enough . . . “ and “There seems to be no room for variation . . .” One of the best appears in the diffidently nihilistic poem, “The Art of Drowning,” in which the dead seek synopsis:

“How about a short animated film, a slide presentation? . . . “

They’re phrases that have the transitory tone of everyday discourse, but they’re phrases whose lights blink yellow in the traffic pattern of a Collins poem. They’re unassuming comments to be envied for the punch lines they set up.

Trick for Treat

As Collins noted in the course of the evening, all poets are driven mad with envy when the hand which pens the prose line becomes a fist grasping the knife of poetry. (And he would wield this analogy much more slyly.) What drove Collins mad first, he told the audience, was John Donne’s “The Flea.” When Donne instructs the reader in the poem’s first line “Mark but this flea,” the instruction is anything but literal.

Donne’s feint is standard fare in a Collins poem.

At times Collins will tease, cajole or simply undo some long-suppressed ribbon of silliness. But be advised that surprise can strike at any moment, even in the form of critique.

Reading several poems compiled in his audiobook Endless Love, including “Cheerios,” “To My Favorite Seventeen Year Old Girl,” “Hippos on Holiday, “Revenant” and others, the evening had this listener ready for the irony, trickery and metonymy that slipped onto the stage in the guise of a tennis shoe clad writer.

When in “Consolation” he writes

I will not puzzle over the bill or record in a journal

what I had to eat and how the sun came in the window.

It is enough to climb back into the car

as if it were the great car of English itself . . .

one is smug enough to climb back into the car with him, at least until we are undone by his next turn of phrase, on what had until then, seemed to be the casual remarks of an ordinary guide on an ordinary road.

Barb on Bard

One of the more entertaining complaints about Collins’ work was posted by Gregory Orr. Orr’s versified critique slyly imitated the better-known writer by arguing that

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.

Plip! (Sound of barb landing on bard.)

Perhaps the same complaints would be made of those Collins credits with inspiring his style: Ron Padgett (“How to Be Perfect”) and William Matthews (“Bucket’s Got a Hole in It”). Also subject to the complaint, one whom Collins told the audience he admires, is Charles Simic (whose poem “The Infinite” offered the sleepy truism that “The infinite yawns and keeps yawning”).

Collins also recommends the book, Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s (Gerald Nachman, Back Stage Books, 2004).

Yet it can also be argued that Collins is able to mount, with an ease that does not disappoint, a persuasive case for a truism as trite as gratitude to Mom. He not exactly achieves, not exactly accomplishes, but rather elevates respectfulness to its next logical rung. In “The Lanyard,” a boy’s woefully humble gift of a handmade lanyard for his mother occasions her declaration:

'Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,

strong legs, bones and teeth and two clear eyes to read the world.' she whispered.

It’s not prose, nor can the unreliable narrator be trusted that she whispered this line – despite the quotation marks. Yet the declaration flows as easily as ordinary speech, its poetic payload carried on a much-used frame.

Is this generous version of Mom made visible by Collins’ experience as a single child, able to see this giver’s gift despite its omnipresence? The poem he read earlier in the evening, placing himself alone in the back seat of the family car, set the stage for such an interpretation.

Poetry Loud

Collins may not aspire to the pantheons and vanishing points of the craft – nor may others with their more multivariate equations, for that matter. Yet, to lift a few lines from his “Man Listening to Disc,” his poetry is plenty “loud”:

This music is loud yet so confidential.

I cannot help feeling even more

like the center of the universe

than usual . . .

Perhaps his is just a way of seeing ourselves

so damned foolish we have become beautiful without even knowing it.

Next up at Landmark

Red Molly on June 16, 2019.