Billy Collins and the Homeless Poets of Bryn Mawr

Stuart Mitchner

At last week's annual Bryn Mawr-Wellesley book sale dealers and collectors rushed the book-laden tables in a semi-civilized variation on a Filenes Basement free-for-all. This week National Poetry Month begins and I've been reading Billy Collins's latest collection, Nine Horses, now available in a Random House trade paperback for $12.95.

Once the opening-hour furor at Bryn Mawr dies down, I usually visit the poetry section because I always find interesting, worthy, low-priced and sometimes signed volumes the dealers have passed over. You won't see Wallace Stevens first editions there (online they go for $700-plus), and unless you're among the first to hit the tables you probably won't find Billy Collins either. Shoppers who understand the literary stock market will have snapped him up, betting on him as a star with staying power.

What about Billy Collins then? What makes him our most popular major poet? But first, what about poetry? Why is the idea of a popular major poet such an anomaly in a country that honors poetry with a National Month? There is no equally large-scale celebration of prose fiction, no National Novel Month, no novelist laureate. Poetry is in a class by itself, a national resource that presumably expresses the spirit of our culture. In fact, what we think of as serious poetry is far from popular, and even if people cared to make the effort, a great deal of what passes for major work is not, to put it plainly, reader-friendly.

When I sift through the rows of dealer-rejected volumes on the poetry tables at Bryn Mawr, it's hard not to think of them in human terms. Here are the forgotten ones, "mute inglorious Miltons," obscure, unappreciated, often self-published, or once celebrated, now out of fashion, as is the case with E. A. Robinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose books inevitably turn up at these sales. This year, as always, I adopted a few homeless refugees, among them one from 1951 whose dust jacket claims a previous work won prizes "and made sales history for a volume of verse"; in 2004 the same poet is worth $1 on the Bryn Mawr market. I also picked up a volume from 1943 interestingly inscribed by a highly acclaimed poet; even with the inscription, it's just another $1 item. I was surprised to find a relatively collectible poet like Tess Gallagher among the neglected, especially when her book was inscribed: "For C. on the first night you heard poetry: yes, write, write with terror." A dealer would have grabbed this $1 bargain and sold it for $50, maybe $100 – if someone hadn't spilled coffee on it.

As for Billy Collins, who recently finished his two-year term as Poet Laureate, people have been buying his books at a rate that justifies the precedent-shattering advance Random House paid for his collection, Sailing Alone Around the Room. Thousands more have heard him on NPR and crowded the halls where he's given readings. Two years ago this month, when he was in Princeton reading to a standing-room-only crowd at the James Stewart auditorium, I was one of those standing. The person who read before him was an accomplished poet whose work demanded intense concentration, at least on my part. The audience seemed admiring but underwhelmed.

When introducing Billy Collins, Princeton University's prize-winning poet C. K. Williams read a sample from Nostalgia ("Remember the 1340s? We were doing a dance called the Catapult/You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade') and the audience immediately came to life. Even secondhand, the Collins charm is formidable. In person, he's balding, slightly built, deceptively demure, with a good but not great reading voice. Yet he rocks the house. Why? It's not merely wit or charm, or even that odd, somewhat dated word, fancy. No matter how high this poet's fancy flies, he is always lucid, right there, never hiding behind the screens that too many poets use to make up for a lack of music or substance. Billy Collins's poetry is never amusing at the expense of its music or its substance.

Nine Horses includes two of the poems that broke up the audience at the Princeton reading. In "The Country," the Collins fancy exploits a simple request from his host not to leave a box of wooden matches lying around the house "because the mice might get into them and start a fire." It takes some kind of jazzy genius to balance the cartoon aspect of the ensuing fantasy with the chorus he plays after depicting the mouse with the match between its teeth ("the blue tip scratching against a rough-hewn beam/the sudden flare") setting the house on fire, the mouse becoming "a torchbearer/in a forgotten ritual/a little brown druid/illuminating some ancient night." In a lesser poem, allusions this extreme might seem ponderous; here they're amusing, striking, and charming all at once because the comic momentum is working from the first bantering move ("Who could sleep that night?") to the denouement: "Who could fail to notice/lit up in the blazing insulation/the tiny looks of wonderment on the faces/of his fellow mice, onetime inhabitants/of what once was your house in the country?"

Another poem in Nine Horses that had the audience laughing was "Litany," wherein Collins riffs brilliantly on another poet's hackneyed trope ("You are the bread and the knife/the crystal goblet and the wine"), turning it into a playful competition that allows him to have his analogical cake and eat it, too: "However, you are not the wind in the orchard/the plums on the counter,/or the house of cards." After telling the other poet what he can and cannot be ("There is no way you are the pine-scented air"), Collins weighs in: "It might interest you to know,/speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,/that I am the sound of rain on the roof." He also claims to be a shooting star, the evening paper, a basket of chestnuts, a blind woman's teacup, and the moon in the trees: "But don't worry, I am not the bread and the knife./You are still the bread and the knife./You will always be the bread and the knife." It's the Collins magic in action as he hits the comic note for all it's worth while running brilliant changes on the aspect of his craft suggested by the pointed reference to "the plentiful imagery of the world", in case we think he's just playing games. He knows the downside of charm and popularity. Here he's hinting to those who might patronize his work as "amusing", "clever", and "light" that his true mission is to explore "the plentiful imagery of the world."

In "Night Club," the poem he concluded the Princeton reading with, he produces a stanza that sends people on their way knowing they have been touched by something more potent than charm. As he imagines "the large man with the tenor sax' handing it down to him, he becomes the poet playing the poem: "So I put the mouthpiece to my lips/and blow into it with all my living breath." What he plays echoes the love song cliche he began the poem with ("You are so beautiful and I am a fool/to be in love with you"): "We are all so foolish,/ my long bebop solo begins by saying,/ so damn foolish/ we have become beautiful without even knowing it."

Reading or listening to Billy Collins, we become funny, human, brilliant, charming, ridiculous, and beautiful, among numerous other states of being. That's poetry.