His poetry helps widen what has become a small and exclusive circle

07/01/2001

By TOM MAYO

"Amusing." "Gentle." "Light." "Accessible." "Best-selling."

These are some of the words often used to describe Billy Collins' poetry. In serious poetry circles, these are damning-with-faint-praise words. Expect them to be debated seriously this summer following the librarian of Congress' recent announcement that Mr. Collins will succeed venerated nonagenarian Stanley Kunitz as our national poet laureate.

I confess that Billy Collins has been a favorite of mine for many years. My literature class begins with "Introduction to Poetry," in which he gently chides students who want to "tie the poem to a chair with rope/ and torture a confession out of it./ They begin beating it with a hose/ to find out what it really means." After dozens of readings, I still marvel at his "Workshop," a Möbius strip of a poem in which an instructor's reactions to a student's work become the poem he is discussing.

Academic bard

Mr. Collins is the antidote to modern poetry's illness, famously diagnosed by Dana Gioia in the May 1991 Atlantic Monthly: "American poetry now belongs to a subculture. No longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life, it has become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group." From his perch as distinguished professor of English at Lehman College at the City University of New York and writer-in-residence at Sarah Lawrence, Mr. Collins has earned his place among that small and isolated group.

But he is an incessant public reader of his poems who has traveled widely and often and who has appeared frequently on Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion. (OK: I realize that appearances on PHC are more likely to ensconce him in that small and isolated group, not elevate him out of it, but these are popular poetry readings on a relatively massive scale, nonetheless.)

More to the point, his poetry insistently appeals to the mainstream. It brims with shared confidences, speaking softly and inviting the reader to come a little closer to the page. He does not write above or below his audience, but right at them. He engages us in intimate conversation that often spills over the side of everyday experience and spins implausibly but enjoyably into the nether regions of the space-time continuum.

Poetic brinksmanship

In "The Country," for example, he does a riff on his host's straight-faced warning "never to leave/ a box of wooden, strike-anywhere matches/ lying around the house because the mice/ might get into them and start a fire."

Collins imagines "the one unlikely mouse/ padding along a cold water pipe/ behind the floral wallpaper/ gripping a single wooden match/ between the needles of his teeth." The tip of the match grazes a wooden beam and in the sudden flare there is "the creature/ for one bright, shining moment/ suddenly thrust ahead of his time – / now a fire-starter, now a torch-bearer/ in a forgotten ritual, little brown druid/ illuminating some ancient night."

A poet of the exurban and the familiar, Collins often takes his readers on some wild flight of fancy before bringing us back to firmer terra, as he does in "The Country": "Who could fail to notice," he asks,

lit up in the blazing insulation,

the tiny looks of wonderment on the faces

of his fellow mice, one-time inhabitants

of what once was your house in the country?

If you are looking for a good place to start reading Mr. Collins, try the World Wide Web: many online poems are assembled at www.bigsnap.com/linklibrary.html.

When you are ready to start buying, there's Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes, a fine collection of selected poems from Picador (£6.99, about $9.90 paperback). The University of Pittsburgh Press still has three original collections in print (Picnic, Lightning ; The Art of Drowning; and Questions About Angels, $11.58 each, paperback). And after much wrangling with Pitt, Random House (Mr. Collins' new publisher) has scheduled a "new and selected" volume – Sailing Alone Around the Room – for release this September.

Tom Mayo, an associate professor of law at Southern Methodist University, teaches "Law, Literature & Medicine" at the law school and at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School at Dallas.