All right, Joe, I’ll bite, though I hesitate to accept a title like “poet-in-residence” for the simple reason that I haven’t actually written much poetry in the last five years.
A prosaic turn of mind hasn’t stopped me, however, from thinking about poetry. Poetry-as-aural-experience is a fact of life in my house, so I’m hardly disposed to say that there’s anything wrong with that. I’m an avid reader-aloud of poetry, especially to my children, and I’ll tell anyone willing to listen (again, my children, who really have no choice) that it’s our ears primarily, not our eyes, which remember poems.
So far, so good, right? But here’s what I wonder about Billy Collins: how much of his poetry is the kind of thing our ears not only receive, but remember? How many of his lines return unbidden into the mind once we’ve finished listening to them? Wordsworth wrote, “The music in my heart I bore/Long after it was heard no more.” I’m not prepared right this second to die for the idea that this, and nothing else, is what defines poetry, but—well, how much Billy Collins do you bear in your heart, long after he’s stopped talking?
Actually, I know how I’d answer that question. I can recite one Billy Collins line off the top of my head: “And here is your lanyard.” Make of that what you will.
Before five hundred people write in to repeat for me all their favorite Billy Collins passages, committed to heart as people used commonly to commit sacred scripture, let me qualify what I just said. It’s not that you can’t memorize Billy Collins’s poetry if you want to. In fact, if you’ve got it on CD and listen to it a lot, I would imagine that you have in fact memorized a good bit more than I have. I would argue, however, that this isn’t exactly the same thing as memorizing poetry written to appeal to the ear via the traditional aural devices of rhyme and meter. You may be able to call up passages, even whole poems, at will. But I’m not sure that this act of remembering is the same act by which we recall poetry.
Let me give you an example. Billy Collins has, in England, a children’s-poet counterpart named Michael Rosen. Now, as for me and my house, we are tremendous fans of Michael Rosen. Among other things, he has written an excellent book on Shakespeare for children, but the reason my children love him is that, in about 2000 or 2001, while we were living in Cambridge, we happened to check out from the library an audiobook of his poems, entitled Just Wait Till I’m Older Than You.
I think we may very possibly still owe overdue fines on this tape. We listened to it, and we listened to it, and we listened to it, and then we listened to it some more. When we left England in 2003, I was almost tempted to check it out again and drop it into a packing box by premeditated mistake. As it turned out, I didn’t have to, because as a family we have most of it committed to memory anyway and can recite entire poems off the top of our collective head.
The thing is, though, that this isn’t really like reciting poetry. I’m not sure what these poems look like on the page, but they don’t seem to be rhymed or metered (though to be fair, many poets read right through their line endings, and you don’t know that poems rhyme unless you chance to read them). These poems play on the ear like stories—hilariously funny stories, which is really why we remember them, but stories. In short, they might as well be prose. They’d lose nothing by being written in paragraphs, not stanzas. When we recite bits of them aloud, we sound more like people repeating their favorite lines from a Monty Python sketch than people participating in the great oral tradition of poetry:
“The car’s moving!”
“I know the car’s moving!”
“Look at the peaches!”
“Never mind the peaches!”
See what I mean? For those of us who know the whole story, these are funny lines. For the rest of you—well, I’ll have to tell you the story sometime. And here is your lanyard.
Meanwhile, there was one other book—an actual book, this time, not a tape—which I was sorely tempted to check out on a permanent and illicit basis from the public library of Cambridgeshire. Now that I think of it, we probably still owe fines on this one, too. It was a book of poetry for children, by a Cornishman named Charles Causley, and it was as irresistible to me as it was to my children.
There was, and is, a pleasure on an entirely different level from “recalling the funny bits” in saying aloud a poem which begins, “Here’s Reverend Rundle/His gear in a bundle,” or
Good morning, Mr. Croco-doco-dile,
And how are you today?
I like to see you croco-smoco-smile
In your croco-woco-way.
These poems were often funny; they were often lyrical and even—and this is unusual in children’s poetry—haunting. They were wonderful to read aloud and to hear, not only because what they had to say was funny, or lyrical, or haunting, but in their music, in the very pleasure they took in their own sound.
This is a quality, incidentally, not confined to Causley’s poetry for children. In fact, as the Charles Causley Society’s website points out,
It is difficult to decide which of Causley’s poems can be classified as “children’s poems” since many of them contain several layers of experience.
It’s no slur against Causley’s reputation to say that my children can understand a poem like this or this as readily as they understand the “children’s” poems. And though Causley didn’t make a name for himself via recordings and animations, you can hear him read “Timothy Winters” and a selection of other poems at The Poetry Archive.
So . . . it may look as if I’d forgotten your original question, Joe, but I haven’t. No, I don’t think Billy Collins is killing poetry. But when I stand him up beside poets for whom the idea of an oral tradition of poetry means more than just “intelligible stuff you say out loud”—poets who write memorable music as well as accessible and repeatable lines—it seems to me that we don’ t have to settle for mere life-support, either.
June 5th, 2009 | 3:53 pm
It was nice to hear Billy Collins’ poetry. Nice. I agree completely with Sally’s assessment, though. Nothing really sticks with me.
Some 30 years ago, I sat in a classroom in Norman, OK listening to a French prof reading 19th century poetry. Depsite a memory that recalls precious little, I can still recite much of that poetry. When I read it to myself today, I still hear Dr. Tolson’s voice.
June 5th, 2009 | 4:06 pm
[...] the oral tradition in [...]
June 5th, 2009 | 5:48 pm
When I lived in larger towns, I would go to poetry readings. They had free cheese sometimes. Ritz crackers with a napkin to fidget with during the reading. Not many people would show up for Carolyn Kizer, Mark Strand, Wole Soyinka, Lucille Clifton, Louise Gluck and others I have forgotten. I wandered into a Billy Collins reading one day, not knowing or expecting him to be so popular, and thought what are tons of people doing here? This is a poetry reading. Go home. It upset my apple cart and my bell jar. No free cheese. His personality seemed rather normal; he seemed comfortable, not odd. He smiled. I couldn’t see him jumping off a bridge. Maybe that was why I found it boring.
June 5th, 2009 | 7:47 pm
Honestly, I don’t think he’s a boring reader. I went with my mother and my oldest daughter, who was about twelve at the time, to a reading of his, and it was very entertaining. My daughter enjoyed it far more than some other things I’ve dragged her to in her time, and my mother had that “Oh! Why! This is poetry, and I understand it!” look on her face. So perhaps “life-support” is a bit harsh.
And we did come away with that lanyard line.
I just wonder how much crossover there would actually be from his kind of poetry to poetry like Causley’s, which sounds like traditional poetry. I’ve been trying all afternoon to frame with any accuracy what I think about this — I think Billy Collins is very good for Billy Collins, and for the idea of poetry as a largely present-tense endeavor. Aside from fantasizing about taking off Emily Dickinson’s clothes, he’s not (as far as I know) that engaged in conversation with literary tradition, which may be why his work comes off as shallow. It’s not a well, but a skin of water on the sidewalk. Again, maybe I’m being too harsh, and too fond of my own metaphors. But I’m reminded somehow of a kid in . . . is it Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation, who’s studying art. He’s maybe fifteen, and he says, “I’m not trying to be Rembrandt or all those guys. I’m just trying to be the best ME.” Or something like that.
But maybe I just really need to go read him again. Or listen to him.
June 5th, 2009 | 9:53 pm
No, Sally, don’t go read or listen again. Please.
In the shallowest of professions–I won’t say which as it might incriminate me–I can testify that Mr. Collins is the deepest of poets. And for the very reason you mention: no connection with the literary tradition. All about the sovereign ME. Years ago I read, with great attention, Mark Strand’s The Lice, cover to cover, the metaphors and images going off in my mind like fireworks. Eager for the same sensation all over again, I started re-reading the book as soon as I had finished…and got the same flat feeling you get when you put a comedy album on for the second time. Same with B. Collins.
Alternately–and too your point, though this is prose–that same summer I read Absolom, Absolom all the way through and, eager for the experience all over again, started re-reading the book the minute I’d finished it (ok, I was on a plane and had nothing else…but I was still eager). I’m here to tell you there was no second-time-around-with-the Bob-Newhart-album malaise. It’s simple: the difference between good art and great art.
Also, you bring up the difference what is memorable and what is accessible. I remember passages from Eliot or Stevens because they rhyme, have a distinctive meter, a music that gets into the mind’s grain. But these guys are far from accessible. Collins, on the other hand, is accessible but not memorable–possibly (probably) because there is no substance there beyond the first blush of recognition (i.e.: your mom’s gratitude that she was confronting “poetry” she actually “got”).
Maybe all this is why Franz Wright once threatened me with his shotgun.
June 6th, 2009 | 10:08 am
Of course, “memorable” and “accessible” aren’t necessarily at odds with each other. And in the case of some poets, the work of theirs which remains relatively widely read and remembered is the more accessible. Take Blake, for example. “The Tyger” stays in my mind, not passages from “The Book of Thel.” Blake becomes memorable at the point where his private mythology intersects with recognizable human experience and observation.
June 6th, 2009 | 2:19 pm
Oh, of course not. I never meant to imply such a dichotomy. It was late…the kids had to get to bed…I was preoccupied…you know.
“Memorable” and “accessible” usually do work in harness. And by “accessible” we don’t necessarily mean “easy”. The fact that “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” springs easily to the mind in no way diminishes the haunting deeps in those lines.
I guess what I was trying to say was this: I was raised on the mistaken notion that free verse, stripped of all rhyme and meter and depending solely on the arresting image, was by definition more accessible and user-friendly. (Just recently a colleague of about my own age insisted that rhyme and meter “got in the way of true expression”.) Ironic, then, that the stuff we carry around in our heads, the lines that brace us up in a crisis or console us in our troubles, are more often than not in rhyme and meter–and are therefore more “useful” to us. The bright, shining promise of yet another modern idea goes “phutt”.
You’re right on when you link the notion of accessibility to our human experience–to a factor beyond the form and shape of the poem. We recognize a common situation or feeling and that gives us access to the poem. Then it is up to the poet to distill what we all know into words none of us could have come up with on our own.
June 7th, 2009 | 12:20 am
Oh, I know, believe me! (the late/kids’-bedtime thing, I mean. I marvel that I make sense at all, ever. I’m dashing this off with my little kids finally in bed, and my teenager still out at her prom . . . ).
And yes, I was raised on the same notion re free verse and accessibility, but had an epiphany at some point of precisely the sort you describe: “If free verse is such an improvement, why can’t I remember that much of it?” And “Stopping By Woods” is the perfect example of accessible-but-not-easy.
June 7th, 2009 | 12:42 am
[...] part of your post, Sally, helped me see both what I had been missing and (somewhat shamefully) what it was I was [...]
June 9th, 2009 | 8:24 pm
Billy Collins and many others are accessible, and they’re awful. I mean, c’mon its poetry. What’s going on that this guy is an actual Laureate? There are no standards anymore.
June 12th, 2009 | 2:39 am
[...] Comments I dropped a link last week to an article from Sally Thomas on poetry–”Re: Is Billy Collins Killing Poetry?“–because I was intrigued by her thoughtful explanation of the oral tradition in poetry. [...]
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