Sailing aimlessly around the world

No poet in America is more celebrated today, at least in popular culture, than Billy Collins. After being named the poet laureate of 2001-2003, his already auspicious literary career was launched into the commercial stratosphere; even today, a quick look at the “Popular Classics” table in any nearby Barnes and Noble will find a collection of Collins’s, while the collections of all other poets occupy one slice of a 16 section bookcase covered in dust in the far right corner of the store.

Is his glory deserved? My quick answer is no. I came to this conclusion after reading through Collins’s most popular collection, Sailing Alone Around the Room. True, Collins is responsible for keeping the American poetic movement alive among already dwindling national book sales, but anyone slightly interested in his poetry, and thus poetry in general, would be much better off getting his or her hands on a collection of Donald Justice or Richard Wilbur, both of whom utilize the same simple, modern style of Collins but incorporate many more layers of depth.

Collins’s hamartia lies in the fact that his verse all-too-often makes the transition from the simple to the simplistic. Granted, Collins’s writing is very enticing, and flows, like the stolid streams and days he sometimes evokes, with almost lubricious ease. But the feeling of reading through one of Collin’s poems is like studying long hours for a very easy quiz: you breeze through it, enjoying the ride, but by the end you ask yourself why you put in all the effort in the first place. And like an easy quiz, all the information you retain is deposited in the mind’s version of a Window’s Trash Bin.

At best, Collins’s poems provide a new vantage point to a given situation (some people pride him on this, catching the simple beauty of what to another person might be just a daily activity). For instance, in “The Best Cigarette,” a poem in Sailing Alone, Collins flourishes the act of smoking with gracious writing: “The heralded ones, of course:/ after sex, the two glowing tips/ now the lights of a single ship;/ at the end of a long dinner/ with more wine to come/ and a smoke ring coasting into the chandelier;/ or on a white beach,/ holding one with fingers still wet from a swim.”

At worst, Collins’s poems are completely devoid of meaning, as if he wrote them not having a specific purpose or message in mind at all. For instance, in “Candle Hat,” Collins describes a self-portrait of Goya’s in which the famous artist is wearing a wreath of candles around his head, which he uses for lighting his canvas. By the end, Collins says, “Imagine a lost traveler knocking on his door/ one dark night in the hill country of Spain./ “Come in,” he would say, ‘I was just painting myself,’/ as he stood in the doorway holding up the wand of a brush,/ illuminated in the blaze of his famous candle hat.”
After reading this, I tried, and I tried and I tried to discern some meaning from it, just a reason in Collins’s mind for capturing Goya beyond the sake of introducing the peculiarity of the candle hat. Is Collins hinting at non-conformism? Selflessness? Simple amiability? I came up with nothing. It just seems like Collins saw the self-portrait, thought, “Isn’t this peculiar,” and devised some fancy words to tell someone else, “this candle hat is pretty crazy, huh?”

Most poems are somewhere in between these two polar extremes, but many are unsatisfying. Some Collins poems are definitely worth reading, e.g. “The Dead,” “The Man in the Moon,” maybe even “The Blues.”
But for a true poetic experience, ditch the “All-Time Favorites” section and make your way to the back of the store. There you might find words with weight.