Book Report: Billy Collins

The Trouble with Poetry and Other Poems -- what a great title for a book. Billy Collins is a strange figure in poetry, but I have to give him credit for a wonderful name for his newest book.

I say he's strange for this reason: he's the most popular poet in the country. Creative writing programs start up in his wake, in many places he does readings. He gets people who aren't otherwise interested in poetry interested in poetry. He's funny, perhaps more so during readings than on the page, but occasionally the poems are funny. He's very accessible. If I wanted to, I could recommend a Collins book to my semi-literate librarian friend in Chicago. These are all admirable things.

But then there's this: Collins seems to be a poet almost entirely uninterested in language, line and form. I'm not a neo-formalist, but I believe a poet should at least show a passion for words and verse, if not a mastery of the form. A Collins poem exists on the page in lines, but there never seems to be any reason for his stanzas, line breaks, or line lengths. And he shows a frustrating lack of zeal for words.

What is a poet without language? I could forgive this if his ideas and thoughts were exceptional. Reading some poets in translation, like Rilke, Neruda, or many Russians, the power of thought comes through even when what may have been beautiful language is lost in clunky English. If Collins was writing Russian I don't think he'd be worth translating.

That's not to say this is a waste of a book. First of all, I read a copy for free on loan from BN. It took me maybe an hour to finish it. Compare this to the weeks I spent with Don Quixote, The Odyssey, or The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (still in progress). I could read the collected works of Collins over a pleasant meal.

That gets me to another problem with Collins. He never seems to be doing anything interesting in his poems. He's too often getting up in the morning, watching the sun rise, letting water boil or loitering in his kitchen. Again, this could be forgiven if the poems were more interesting in other ways, but they're not.

I keep going back and forth with this response to the book. That's how I felt reading it: torn between hating it and liking it a bit. There are some clever poems in there: "The Lanyard" is good. And "The Introduction" is a great rant against snobby poets (all of whom collectively loathe Mr. Collins). "The Student," a poem about a book full of rules about what to avoid in writing poetry has a good line for all my fellow Bennies: "Avoid the word vortex.

The good news from the bad is that Collins does inspire me to write, if only to try to write stronger poems than you'll find in The Trouble with Poetry.