Working the Room

Recently named poet laureate, Billy Collins is among the country’s most commercially successful poets. His rise has been swift. While he has been writing for more than 20 years, it has been his three most recent titles--”Questions About Angels,” “The Art of Drowning” and “Picnic, Lightning”--that have in the last five years put him on the map, selling more than 105,000 copies combined, a staggering number for a poet.

Collins’ success lies in a simple formula: an anecdotal, discursive poem about a self-enclosed event that revolves around a solipsist who is whimsical, timid and occasionally impertinent. The result is a banal domestic surrealism. In “Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep a Gun in the House,” for instance, Collins blasts a Beethoven symphony to drown out his neighbors’ barking dog, and then suddenly imagines the dog following the conductor’s baton and barking the symphony’s “famous barking dog solo.” Similarly, in ‘I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey’s Version of ‘Three Blind Mice’,” Collins wonders how the mice “came to be blind./If it was congenital, they could be brothers and sisters , and I think of the poor mother/brooding over her sightless young triplets.”

Clearly, Collins’ surrealism is unlike Andre Breton’s bundle of manifestoes and dreams or Frank O’Hara’s blend of chance and desire. It is a warm and fuzzy absurdity, the product of a decidedly diminished ambition that mixes shock and sentimentality and values stylistic pranks over intellectual foppishness.

Collins’ poems are narrow and unsurprising. They are always front-loaded, with the title or opening lines establishing the governing conceit. The poems often turn from a primary to a secondary image--from barking dog to dog barking in a symphony, for instance--between the seventh and 10th lines, or in the second stanza. The secondary image unifies a poem, and it often involves angels, animals, art or small children. The primary and secondary images are complimentary, not incongruous or contradictory. And the poems invariably end with a rhetorical package (sometimes a statement modified by two or three clauses) designed to provide a symbolic lift.

As for Collins’ language, his poems read like prose with a ragged right-hand margin. Collins invests next to nothing on that margin, with each one of his lines containing a complete thought, clause, or image that runs smoothly into the next, its route very rarely complicated by caesura or enjambment. The poems are loosely rhythmical but hardly musical; Collins’s ear is for colloquial phrases--”but don’t get me wrong,” “to see if everything is OK,” “out of whack.” Overall, he is more interested in using language to maintain a steady forward thrust than to register an emotion or to sound out the cadence of thought. His poems chug along, so much so that when, at the end of “The Best Cigarette,” he compares himself to a locomotive--”That was the best cigarette,/when I would steam into the study/full of vaporous hope and stand there,/the big headlamp on my face/pointed down at all the words in parallel lines”--one knows that, despite the irony of “vaporous,” he’s not kidding.

On the rare occasion that music creeps into Collins’ work, it’s as a prop for a gag. Take Collins’ “Monday Morning,” a riff on Wallace Stevens’ elegant meditation on death, “Sunday Morning.” Stevens’ poem begins, “Complacencies of the peignoir, and late/Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,” and then introduces an unnamed woman: “She dreams a little, and she feels the dark/Encroachment of that old catastrophe.” Collins alters the scene and the persona: “The complacency of this student, late/for the final, who chews her pen for an hour,/who sits in her sunny chair,/with a container of coffee and an orange.”

One might argue that Collins is parodying “Sunday Morning,” reinvigorating the work of an old master with a dose of wit. But that’s not the case because Collins doesn’t investigate or criticize his source; he isn’t interested in Stevens’ thoughts about death. But isn’t the poem a spoof, a mustache painted on the Mona Lisa? Hardly, since its jokes aren’t at Stevens’ expense.

Collins has said that “I think of humor not as a way of entertaining readers but as a way of accessing more serious areas.” But “Monday Morning” reveals the severe limits of his approach. Instead of discovering himself in a hilarious, and by turns grave, predicament, he sets out to be funny; he is a little too eager to work the room. In “Introduction to Poetry,” Collins complains that all his creative writing students want to do “is tie the poem to the chair with rope/and torture a confession out of it.” In “Monday Morning” and many other verses in “Sailing Alone Around the Room,” all Collins can manage to do is tie a poem to a chair and rapidly torture a joke out of it.