Seventy-five Needles in the Haystack of Poetry
I have said bad things about Billy Collins in the past and I need to stop. Actually, I need to apologize to Mr. Collins (at times I wonder if my blog is carefully screened by the Poetry Snark Police, sending whole paragraphs of glib criticism to the respected email addresses of various poets) having committed the first grievous sin in the poetry blog world: committing on work I had not personally read. For the record, here is the sentence that brought down the wrath of sanctimonious poets and the people who love them:
A friend of mine announced one night over dinner that 83 percent of contemporary poetry is not worth reading. (Collins, xv)
In my defense, I think a couple of my statements were fair, "It seems to be in vogue for the top of the poetry heap to complain about what is being written today … or at least it was 2 years ago at the Dodge Festival in New Jersey. Again, I think a person with dignity would devote their lives to other projects if they really thought the hundreds of us writing today (Virgil Suarez estimated once that only about 800 people serious devote themselves to poetry in this country) had nothing to say. What a sad waste of that person's energy!" Yes … but still, I owe Billy Collins an apology.
In any case, if you haven't actually read the five page Introduction to the Best American Poetry 2006 (and only the first two paragraphs where Collins' claim that only 17% of poetry worth reading) then you missed out on some interesting criteria he uses to judge what he likes and takes other critics to task. This highly interests me for many of the same people, in whose blogs I've been following the drama (and more or less damn the man to some sort of poetry hell for the crime of "superiority," passing "value judgments" and being "contradictory"),1 all suffer from various forms of superiority, passing value judgments and being contradictory themselves. Myself included.
For example, even though I like to think POETRY as some sort of Small-Town Democratic Movement (and what I realize I am thinking about is not poetry per se but open mic. poetry readings that allow everyone "5 minutes or 3 poems, whatever comes first" — thanks Rue!) I too have my own ideas of what makes good poetry and bad poetry. My book shelve are full of good poetry. The stuff I don't buy is bad poetry. So I am a capitalist? Just like everyone I know in America. I also happen not to like post-modern critic-speak that fills the pages of many acclaimed poetry magazines that, after re-reading it for a third time, still makes me feel dumb for not understanding post-modern critic-speak. Apparently neither does Billy Collins. He states:
For me, the thorny word in the [book's] title is not best but poetry, because I am rarely sure of what we are talking about when we talk about poetry. Serious discussions of poetry commonly imply a very narrow definition of the genre. When I hear it said that "poetry … is about the extending of human consciousness, making conscious the unconscious, creating a symbolic consciousness that in its finest moments overcomes all the dualities in which the human world is cruelly and eternally … enmeshed," I wonder if that would include Alexander Pope's "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot" or the Yukon poems of Robert Service. When I read that "poetry's perpetual direction is its way of ensouling events, of seeking the doubleness in the events, the events' hidden or contradictory meaning," I get the feeling the writer did not have Chaucer's ribaldry in "The Miller's Tale," Swift's vituperative "The Character of Sir Robert Walpole," or Ovid's "The Art of Love" … So much poetry — traditional and contemporary — falls outside the circle of such discussions that we might pause in our awareness of how small an area is circumscribed by such high-sounding, presumptuous critical talk. Many vital poems are excluded for being too ludic, satirical, insufficiently hallowed, or for coming up short in the sensitivity department (ibid, xvii — xviii)
And in a world where people use the term Neo-Formalist as in insult, that rings true. And what is wrong to be drawn to a poem with a "recognizable sound of a human voice" at the helm? Or poems that "seem to be going somewhere"? And most importantly Collins explains what makes a good or bad poem and then follows through with seventy-five examples. Important because so often I have no idea what criteria other scholars use to judge a poem. It is refreshing to get a glimpse at what makes another poet tick.
Works Cited
Collins, Billy. The Best American Poetry 2006. New York: Scribner Book Company (2006)
- the last charge I call up old Unka Walt's "Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself" in defense. In fact, most of the bushwhack attacks on Collins have nothing to do with what he wrote in his Introduction, rather they are attacks on his character, his poetry and what bastards all poetry critics are, the bushwhacker being the sole exception. [back]