The crab that got out of the bucket

Kay Day

Some days I don't get as much work done as I should because of poetry. I'm a junkie, really. I write it, moderate a poetry workshop, facilitate an ongoing poetry seminar, present it at various events, write columns for two magazines about it, and spend a lot of time reading it in my quiet room. I hunger for it much as a lover of drugs, who senses a needlesome urge at the very mention of the substance to which he is addicted. Not satisfied with my own consumption of it, I am driven to share it with others, not only my own work but the work of poets I enjoy as well. By these processes, Billy Collins entered my world a few years ago--I don't remember exactly when. He is one of many diverse poets I enjoy, poets whose work spans many centuries. And at the moment, I'd say he is the hottest poet on the broad American landscape, for he has become a poet not only for serious writers, but also for those who simply like to read poetry.

In a review of Billy Collins’s book, Sailing Alone Around the Room, poet and critic Ernest Hilbert notes Cyril Connolly’s description of poets arguing about modern poetry as, “jackals snarling at one another over a dried well.” Connolly is the fellow who also said, “Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice.” Educated in Great Britain, he was a novelist, essayist and book reviewer who died in 1974. I suspect his scenario has been around for quite sometime; one only need visit Aristotle to confirm it. "...Ariphrades ridiculed the tragedians," the philosopher notes in Poetics, "for using phrases which no one would employ in ordinary speech; for example, domatum apo, 'from the house away,' instead of apo domatum, 'away from the house....It is precisely because such phrases are not part of the current idiom that they give distinction to the style. This, however, he failed to see."

Mr. Hilbert, who earned his Ph.d. in English from Oxford, is the poetry editor for Random House’s online literary magazine, “boldtype.com.” He himself is a scholarly poet, and what I’ve read of his work involves classical themes. He is kind enough to offer footnotes to the reader, with one such footnote in La Petite Zine for the poem, “Coronation of Sesostris,” explaining a mental conjunction of a sarcophagus in a British museum, Valley of the Kings in Egypt, and canvases by Cy Twombly.

Hilbert’s review is a fairly level-headed assessment of Collins, although an individual with a doctorate earned at Oxford might have a wee bit of trouble understanding this most American poet. And I say that in an admittedly subjective manner. Hilbert is fairly subjective as well, not only regarding poetry, but also regarding Americans in general. “Ease of reading,” he writes, “aesthetic bubbles that pop at a touch, are everything in some quarters, especially in classrooms where basic grammatical units are troubling to affluent twenty-two year olds incubated in the sour light of video games and bad music.” Ouch.

I’ve heard just about every Billy Collins argument there is, both pro and con. Fans praise his accessibility, his down-to-earth humor, his poetry that can at least be understood by a literate reader. And then there are those who turn up their scholarly noses and insist that no poet is worth his salt if he can be understood on a drive-through basis, much like a poet zooming past in a sporty little car and tossing poems out the window. By the time the car reaches the light at the end of the street, the reader is saying, “Wow, man, I really like that. Think I’ll go listen to some Eminem and play Blood Rain for awhile.” However, I certainly don't see Collins as a drive-through poet.

Leave it, in my opinion, to a bunch of poets to screw things up.

When Billy Collins took the stage at Tallahassee’s University Center Club, very few chairs out of 803 were empty. He charmed his audience and connected with them in a way I hadn’t witnessed at a poetry reading in almost thirty years. He read, “The Country,” and everyone in the room applauded with joy because who among us hasn’t experienced night fears over some silly thing when we were small, or, for that matter, when we are older? By the time he gets to the final lines, you’d have to be aesthetically challenged to not be able to take the poem beyond its linear meaning.

Who could fail to notice,

lit up in the blazing insulation,
the tiny looks of wonderment on the faces
of his fellow mice, onetime inhabitants
of what once was your house in the country?

Collins, in the first lines of the poem, gives the reader a warning many who grew up in a rural atmosphere will recognize. You don't leave a box of wooden matches open and available for the nearest mouse, who is a closet arsonist at heart and will burn your house down. The poem is charming, and lets the reader play with the mouse until those final lines. But is the poem really about a mouse? I don't think so. I think Collins might be having a bit of fun with his highbrow critics, because, in reality, he has burned the poetry house down pretty good, or what was left of it. I think the entire poem is a conceit on that very issue.

Who could whisk away the thought
of the one unlikely mouse
padding along a cold water pipe

behind the floral wallpaper
gripping a single wooden match
between the needles of his teeth?

In introducing Collins, Florida State University Professor David Kirby mentioned poetry's development from, "the house that Walt and Emily built," to the confessionals whom he noted were handy for recruiting English majors. Enter Billy Collins, who, Kirby notes, "reinvented the American poem."

I'd twist that comment a bit and say Collins has re-delivered the American poem. Much of the poetry written over the last twenty years is admittedly incredible poetry, to someone who reads a lot of poetry, philosophy and history. But somehow, without intending to, poets removed this genre from mainstream America. At a recent workshop, where all the participants were educated people, I asked them to name ten living American poets. Not a single person could do so. Then I said, okay, name some dead ones. Whitman, Dickinson, Pound, Tennyson--need I say more? But every person in the room knew exactly who Billy Collins is and many of them have bought his books. I am stressing these people are educated.

I had the honor, as did many other people, of talking to Collins at the reception after his reading. This was no small feat. The man signed every book, hundreds of them, put in front of him. One young man who appeared to be a student, had the audacity to bring a stack of books intended for resale. Collins simply laughed and signed them anyway as his irate fans looked on. The man has a heart the size of Texas. But the charming man himself has nothing to do with his poetry, or with the assessment of it.

When I sat beside him, I told him he has awakened American poetry, and we talked a bit about other poets who commanded the sort of attention he does. James Dickey came to mind, of course, because he was my friend and I witnessed firsthand the sort of adulation Dickey commanded. I told our Poet Laureate that he has a great gift for connecting with an audience, and he said, "That's what it's all about." The reader, for him, is important. We simply sat and talked for awhile, about poetry, about readers, about the fact that he had to be in Ohio the next day after what had to be an exhausting visit in Florida. In parting, I told him I knew he'd be remembered. And he said, "We'll see."

Aside from his popularity, that sort of modesty is one of the things that drives his critics crazy. The impression of poets created over the last fifty years involves depression, frequent suicide, and the dark recesses of human nature, indeed, of the human body in some cases. "He never treads the dark realms that attract most American poets," writes Hilbert,"the clatter of over-alliterated "spoken" poetry or the clutter of the historically over-detailed long poem."

As a poet, I enjoy poetry that delves the "dark realms," as well as spoken word poetry, poetry about historical themes, and poetry that can border on obscurity. There's dada and language poetry--literally dozens of styles and containers that we, of all who came before us, can enjoy. But I believe Collins has developed his own strong style, his own means of making a poem appear so simple that it can be grasped by an audience, but that with subsequent readings can deepen, even darken. If we look hard enough.

One of the poems he read at FSU is a favorite of mine. "The Dead" weaves a conceit of those who have passed on rowing a boat up above and looking down on us. "They row themselves slowly through eternity," the poem goes. It is a visual poem, with lines that inform the dead are watching the tops of our heads, and waiting, "like parents, for us to close our eyes." Every time I read the poem, I see something in it that I didn't think of the first time, beginning with parallels to Greek mythology and winding my way around to contemporary emphasis on spirituality, the notion of spirit worlds, the idea of being watched over. And it is a poem I have read and shared with others many times. I sometimes want to ask a person who can't enjoy this poem, "What's wrong with you? Can you not see the beauty in the words, in the syntax, in the painting the poet is drawing with words? And it is a precise painting spawned from an imagination that both delights and intrigues. Enter Aristotle, who wrote, "But the greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances." Segue to modern times, and Rilke intones, "....seek those [themes] which your own everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, passing thoughts and the belief in some sort of beauty--describe all those with loving, quiet, humble sincerity, and use, to express yourself, the things in your environment, the images from your dreams, and the objects of your memory."

An anecdote I love to tell when I read or make a workshop presentation involves Robert Frost, who had to turn to the British for validation before America would embrace him, then make him one of the most beloved poets in modern history. Peter Davison, explains it in a 1996 column in The Atlantic Monthly:

Sometime in 1912, before Robert Frost made his famous leap to "live under thatch" in England, where he would become known as a poet, he sent some of his poems to Ellery Sedgwick, the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and in due course received a personal reply that read, "We are sorry that we have no place in The Atlantic Monthly for your vigorous verse." Frost's submission included some of his finest early poems -- "Reluctance," for example.

Of course, Billy Collins must irritate the rank and file because of his popularity and also his sales. Publishers fight over his contract, and every time he reads, he attracts large numbers of people. And of course, American poetry has long sparked debates over whether poetry that's popular with the people is worth anything, whether poetry that does not require footnotes or advanced scholarly discipline is worth praising. Fact is, America has changed so drastically in the last 50 years that we should not be surprised to see literature change as well. Fiction has certainly morphed. A recent best-seller involved a memoir written in the voice of a woman after she'd been murdered. In poetry, diversity in culture has returned forms like the pantoum and introduced forms like the ghazal. Collin's poetry is a poetry that speaks to an America in the present, that carves a niche for itself that declares that niche very different and unique when compared to much of the poetry in anthologies and collections. He has managed to cross the threshold of a genre that has been variously declared dead and irrelevant, and attract readers who are not themselves poets, readers who buy his books and enjoy reading his work, not just one time but many

This is what I find so silly. That in the vast literary landscape of American letters, we have one crab that has managed to climb out of the dark little bucket where so many love to reside. And like the Hawaiian, or depending upon your point of reference, Native American fable, those little crabs in the dark bucket crawl sideways up to the top, trying ever so hard to pull the lucky one back down.

Kay Day