Selected By Cyril Wong

You can always trust The New York Times to feature fun reviews like this classic one from 2006 to grab your attention. Bitchily formatted into a Billy Collins-styled poem, it is probably the only reason why fans of the poet would have read David Orr's review of Billy Collins's The Trouble With Poetry at all. As a fan of Collins myself, I would have had a laugh at the review, then gone out to buy the book anyway. Fans of Collins' accessible verse tend to be those who remain unconvinced by other trends in poetry that can seem bogged down by over-educated obscurity or explicit political gestures. (Personally, I just have a wide taste in different styles of poetry.) Reviews come and go while the books they target remain on the shelves and continue to be read, even enjoyed. So it is with great sympathy that I have chosen to re-look at Orr's hilarious review here and celebrate its eagerness to excoriate.

The reviewer begins with an opening line from a Collins poem that demonstrates how "reader conscious" the poet is famous for being in his books:

I wonder how you are going to feel
when you find out
that I wrote this instead of you

…is a typical Collins beginning -
a good-natured wave…
between writer and reader…

Anyway, it is a tribute
to the former Poet Laureate
that he is able to make us believe,

despite our anxious response to poetry,
that we are participating
in each Billy Collins poem

It is a technical achievement…
and it involves a special sensitivity
to the nature of reading, of hearing…

Having established what is positive, the review-poem segues efficiently to what it hates about the poet:

by observing, for instance,
that Billy Collins too often relies
on the same blandly ironic tone

and the same conversational free verse,
loosely organized in tercets
or the occasional quatrain
when an extra line jogs onto the page,

or that his poems often begin well
and then spiral down
into unsurprising images…

or that, most important,
he is often humorous
without actually being funny…

If being bland or unfunny is not profound enough as a point of criticism, Orr applies the gesture of "I-know-you-think-I-mean-this-but-no-I-actually-mean-this" that critics like him love to do so well:

given Collins's reputation
for teasing our stuffy poetic traditions…

the problem with his work
is not that it is disrespectful,
but that it is not disrespectful enough…

lending itself with disappointing ease
to the stale imagery
of teachers, desks and wisecracking.

Not surprisingly, in conclusion, a critic like Orr is eager to tell us what we should like from reading a book of poems:

In the end, what we need
from a poet with Collins's talent
is not a good-natured wave

from writer to reader,
or a literary joke, or a mild chuckle;
what we need is to be drawn

high into the poem's cloud-filled air
and allowed to fall
on rocks real enough to hurt.

_____