Re: Billy Collins

One of the first things I said of Billy Collins’ Picnic, Lightning: “This is facile.” I stand by that. These poems are, lightweight, easy. But that might not be such a negative; that might be the poems’ genius.
These poems aren’t deep yet they push the reader to look more closely at the world, and what else do I want from poetry, from art?
These poems are facile, but now I mean it in the sense of facility, of fluidity – they are incredibly smooth, wide, steady rivers flowing through straight banks.
When at first I chafe at the topics he writes about – who cares what he learned today from reading a single-volume encyclopedia? – but now I acknowledge his courage and deft skill writing about subjects such as a Victoria’s Secret catalogue, or undressing Emily Dickinson, or the contents of his journal.
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A second helping of Collins -- an earlier collection of poems, Questions About Angels (published in 1991, reprinted by Pitt in 1999) -- was bland, unfulfilling. What smelled fresh now smells stale, empty. Or does it? Collin’s style seems painfully plain; he creates poems so mundane they hardly register on my aesthetic conscious. (Yet when I step back, inside this parentheses, I admire the clarity of the poems. Hell, anybody, with or without a degree in poetics, can see the world mirrored clearly in the poems.Isn't there some value in that?)
Did I not experience the same pleasure because I was not startled by the simplicity, not surprised by the topics Collins chose to write about (“Weighing the Dog,” “Going Out for Cigarettes,” “The Willies”)? Picnic, Lightning stimulated? Questions About Angels numbed. But hedonist that I am, I will go back to Collins for one more shot, maybe. Maybe I can get at least a contact high from his selected poems; maybe he has something to say to the young readers I hope will read throughout their lives... Maybe I should keep re-thinking this notion of teacher as poetry-pusher...