Happy Birthday, Billy Collins

Former poet laureate of the United States. Want to see the entire list of poets laureate? Go here. Pretty cool.

One of the things that I love about Billy Collins (besides his poetry, I mean) is that he is a truly popular poet. His books are bestsellers – and they were so even BEFORE he was a poet. I love poetry of all kind – obscure, experimental, confessional, etc. – but I also love the poets who speak directly into the experience of most people. Billy Collins is one of those poets. A lot of people discount his work because of this, but I don’t find that to be a very intelligent position. It’s similar to those who got MAD at Kurt Cobain for becoming successful and making some money, as though that made his art somehow “lesser”.

There’s a deeper issue here: Poets used to be much more important, and poetry was something most people enjoyed. Kids had to memorize poems in class. Poetry was not seen as elitist. Now I think a lot of the people who call poetry elite basically just don’t like “fancy book larnin” and they label anything challenging or outside their experience as “elitist” (I have experienced that first-hand on my site countless times), so we can discount their opinions. Or I can, and I do. Happily. But I think a lot of it, too, is that with the birth of confessional poetry in the 50s and 60s, when many poets stopped concerning themselves with the universal. They delved totally into the personal. And while that may be exciting when done well, when done poorly it is unreadable.

Blue stockings
Oh my heart
A glass window, my codeine tablets
Chickadee monkey
Flippity floppity
Oh say can you see
I am dying

Or whatever, Write your own. This is the kind of purely descriptive stuff that fills the pages of The New Yorker now. Great poets, too, but you can recognize a “New Yorker poem” from miles away. It’s a bummer.

These are the artistic children of such geniuses as Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton – true masters of their craft. Yes, they wrote about theie own lives, and mental illness – but nobody could EVER say that they were not good at their work. You may not like that type of poetry – a lot of people don’t (I happen to adore it) … but the imitators are far far worse.

Again, though, I want to make myself clear in light of the whole “I’m not much for fancy book-larnin'” type: I don’t like art only when I can RELATE to it. I’m not only looking for MYSELF in a poem. I like words, I like language, I like writers who challenge me, who go places unexpected. But the fragmented BAD writing which makes up most of modern poetry is kind of disheartening – and it’s no wonder that people aren’t into poetry anymore. Bring back the Dead White Male contingent, please!

Because Billy Collins is so POPULAR, he is not as respected by the chattering classes, which is just a sign of the times, I suppose. I happen to love his stuff. He’s a good writer. Perhaps not as complex as I normally enjoy, and not as howling-at-the-moon-with-despair as I enjoy and relate to on a far more intimate level- but he’s a fine writer, and it was quite a triumph, I thought, when he was asked to be Poet Laureate.

I also love his web site. I love it because whoever put it together obviously has never put together a website before and I find something charmingly naive about that. There are no real links on that first page. It’s strange … then when you get to the Link Index, I am so charmed by this sentence:

BOOK BILLY FOR YOUR NEXT EVENT
Mr. Collins is available for real live appearances

To me, that encapsulates who Billy Collins is. Accessible. Friendly. He makes “real live appearances” … It’s so human, so simple. I love it.

I highly recommend you checking out his work if you haven’t already – and as a way of saying Happy Birthday, I’ll post the poem that he wrote following September 11 – when he was Poet Laureate. I’ve posted it before.

Never ever fails to tear at my heart.

The Names

Yesterday, I lay awake in the palm of the night.
A soft rain stole in, unhelped by any breeze,
And when I saw the silver glaze on the windows,
I started with A, with Ackerman, as it happened,
Then Baxter and Calabro,
Davis and Eberling, names falling into place
As droplets fell through the dark.
Names printed on the ceiling of the night.
Names slipping around a watery bend.
Twenty-six willows on the banks of a stream.
In the morning, I walked out barefoot
Among thousands of flowers
Heavy with dew like the eyes of tears,
And each had a name —
Fiori inscribed on a yellow petal
Then Gonzalez and Han, Ishikawa and Jenkins.
Names written in the air
And stitched into the cloth of the day.
A name under a photograph taped to a mailbox.
Monogram on a torn shirt,
I see you spelled out on storefront windows
And on the bright unfurled awnings of this city.
I say the syllables as I turn a corner —
Kelly and Lee,
Medina, Nardella, and O’Connor.
When I peer into the woods,
I see a thick tangle where letters are hidden
As in a puzzle concocted for children.
Parker and Quigley in the twigs of an ash,
Rizzo, Schubert, Torres, and Upton,
Secrets in the boughs of an ancient maple.
Names written in the pale sky.
Names rising in the updraft amid buildings.
Names silent in stone
Or cried out behind a door.
Names blown over the earth and out to sea.
In the evening — weakening light, the last swallows.
A boy on a lake lifts his oars.
A woman by a window puts a match to a candle,
And the names are outlined on the rose clouds —
Vanacore and Wallace,
(let X stand, if it can, for the ones unfound)
Then Young and Ziminsky, the final jolt of Z.
Names etched on the head of a pin.
One name spanning a bridge, another undergoing a tunnel.
A blue name needled into the skin.
Names of citizens, workers, mothers and fathers,
The bright-eyed daughter, the quick son.
Alphabet of names in a green field.
Names in the small tracks of birds.
Names lifted from a hat
Or balanced on the tip of the tongue.
Names wheeled into the dim warehouse of memory.
So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.