A crowd's favorite is "The Lanyard": the poet as a child made a - he thinks now, useless and pretentious - lanyard (a cord) for his mother, thinking that it would repay all the sacrifices she had made for him.
She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her (...pause) a lanyard. (19-20)
[...]
Here are a thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied, (27-29)
The repetition of the one idea and of the word “lanyard” throughout the poem is hilarious, if monotone. Most of Collins' poems have similar characteristics: they are lyric and easy to understand, each has only one theme or main image, they are syntactically correct, and they avoid rhyme, assonance, or meter. So, they mimic spoken language and seem designed to be recited in public. They can be understood the first time.
I could not discern any profound meanings in Collins' collection of new and re-published poems, “Sailing Alone Around the Room.” The title shows a promising image, a take on “sailing alone around the world,” which is humorous because in real life the poet never seems to be going anywhere. He has lived in the U.S. - mostly in New York – his whole life, and when he writes, "How agreeable it is not to be touring Italy this summer," (“Consolation” 1) he means it.
Most of the titles in the collection are intriguing: “The Art of Drowning,” “Questions about Angels,” “The Apple the Astonished Paris.” However, the poems don't deliver. Sometimes they don't have much to do with the title.
They follow a simple format: first an everyday occurrence, then a quirky twist of the imagination, and a mildly surprising ending. Most of the images are cute but one-dimentional. In “The Death of Allegory” he writes of “a Florida for tropes / Justice is there standing by an open refrigerator” (11-12). Some of his metaphors are unoriginal, as in the poem “Scotland” where he compares the ups and downs of life with bicycling uphill and downhill – a cliche' as old as ...the hills. At the same time he uses precious words as “the encrofted cows” (30) (a croft is a Scottish farm).
This is E-Z poetry, and Collins is proud of it. According to the biography published online by PoetryFoundation.org, the poet himself says that his poetry “is suburban, it's domestic, it's middle class, and it's sort of anashamedly that.”
Billy Collins' poems remind me of the Funnies in the Sunday Paper I used to read in the Eighties. The stories were about ordinary people, and they had a quirky, bitter-sweet observation at the end. The ones published now are the same cartoons as 30 years ago. Reruns? It does not seem so. But the characters exist in an Einsteinian time-space. They take ten years to age one year.
Collins' work appeals to the same kind of nostalgia for easier times. Judging from his poem “On Turning Ten” his magic years ended with his childhood: “The whole idea of it [of growing out of childhood] makes me feel / like I'm coming down with something, / […] a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul” (1-2, 7).
Collins' themes, his dog, his yard with its dead trimmings, his love for his mother, his dumb college students, his white page and black cup of coffee, all conjure up a simple middle-class life without great joys or tragedies. He does not experience life, he muses on it.
As a Poet Laureate of the United States, Collins made his mission to provide the public with accessible poetry. In one of the poems in the collection, "The Flight of the Reader," Collins explains why readers do not leave him, unlike what happens to many "serious" poets. He does not "pester you / with the invisible gnats of meaning" (11 – 12) or "hold up my monstrous mirror" (14). He does not seek to instruct the reader in difficult matters, nor does he frighten them with a version of reality that pessimistic poets call "a mirror," but that is more like a projection of their personal nightmares. The intention is good.
He also compiled 180 easily readable poems to be assigned in public high schools, one per day. The project, The Library of Congress Poetry 180, was well received and the poems are publicly available on the WEB; so, I read most of them (no, it did not take long). The poems are not representative of the other authors' work; rather, they resemble Collins' poems. They are easy to understand, and they are about...nothing in particular. Fortunately in my daughter's very modest public school they are reading Shakespeare instead. Her comment on Collins' poems was, “he doesn't get it.”
I would recommend Collins' poems because they are entertaining, but I would rate them “R,” and not because of the silly prudish subjects like those in “Victoria's Secret” or “Taking off Emily Dickinson's Clothes.” I just don't want young people to think that Collins and the “180” are Literature, and be turned off by it. Young people have real concerns and want to read meaningful works, not this accessible/forgettable stuff.
Collins did write one poem about current events: as a Poet Laureate he was requested by Congress to write a poem on 9/11. I liked Collins' poem; however, I prefer the other poem Professor Browne posted on 9/11, "Photograph from September 11" by Wislawa Szymborska. The image of people leaping off the towers to escape being burned to death is the single image that will remain forever with us as the emblem of 9/11. Without notice, ordinary people were called to make a superhuman decision, that of taking their own life. Szymborska captures these facts in her simple, short poem.
In contrast, Collins' poem “The Names,” if one does not know the context, could have been written for any occasion. It is about the names of the victims of 9/11, and how their memory lingers in everyday life and amidst the landscape. It could be a general poem on the sadness of death, a recurrent theme for this poet who has not fully lived. But we all die.
My favorite poem, which opens the collection, is “Another Reason Why I Don't Keep a Gun in the House.”As in most of his poems, Collins is the narrator. He describes how he is driven insane by the neighbor's dog barking, until he amuses himself by imagining the dog as part of an orchestra performing a Beethoven symphony. The title is not about the theme of the poem, but it adds information to it. A person with a less resourceful imagination could have resorted to violence out of sheer frustration. As usual in Collins poems, this is a situation almost everyone has faced.
It is funny how the dog's performance is described as an "endless coda," which is both a symphonic term and the Italian word for a dog's tail. The choice of Beethoven is appropriate, both because he did develop the ending (coda) of his symphonies, and because his deafness, as we know from the film "Immortal Beloved" was not an absence of sound, but an incessant hammering noise in his ears (like in the poem the dog's incessant barking sound).
The poem is written in quatrains, with the exception of the second stanza, where a fifth line emphasizes that in spite of all his efforts, the poet can still hear the dog “barking, barking, barking,” and the third stanza which is a quick tercet containing the “twist” of Collins' imagining the dog in the orchestra. The description of the dog's performance is made funnier by the use of enjambment (it continues uninterrupted to another line).
There are better contemporary poets out there than Billy Collins, for example Yusef Komunyakaa. In his poem “Facing It” the image of the poet and veteran being "inside" the Vietnam War Memorial, looking at the visitors, is unforgettable. The language is simple but the images yield multiple meanings.
However, when I viewed his poetry reading on YouTube, the poet with the impossible name to pronounce or remember read his magnificent work in a flat tone – to an empty auditorium. I had to turn on 'caption' to understand him. Would I prefer to spend an evening out watching Komunyakaa or Collins? Collins, without a doubt.
Still, I would have preferred Collins to leave me with something I did not know before; but then again, Collins chastises his students for wanting to "tie a poem to a chair," ("Introduction to Poetry" 13) "beating it with a hose / to find out what it really means" (15-16). Collins' poems smile an ingratiating smile, and I release them from their ties and let them go. They wave and vanish. And I go back to reading Shakespeare.
Works Cited
Collins, Billy. Sailing Alone Around the Room. New York: Random House, 2002. Print.
“Biography Billy Collins.” PoetryFoundation.org. 7 Dec. 2013. Web.
“The Lanyard – Billy Collins” PBS.org/wgbh/PoetryEverywhere. 7 Dec. 2013. Web.
Szymborska, Wislawa. "Photograph from September 11.” PoetryFoundation.org. 7 Dec. 2013. Web.
Komunyakaa, Yusef. “Facing It.” The Discovery of Poetry: A Field Guide to Reading and Writing Poems. Ed. Frances Mayes. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2001. 107. Print.
“Poetry 180” loc.gov/poetry/180/180-list. 6 Sept. 2006. Web.
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