Billy Collins

An old poem of mine prompted by ole Billy!

Photo via the Sonoma Valley Authors Festival

Last night, I heard Alice Allan read Joshua Mehigan’s poem “Introduction to Poetry,” which of course reminded me of Billy Collins’s “Introduction to Poetry” poem, which in turn reminded me of a poem I wrote all the way back in 2020 that I titled “Billy Collins.” I had actually dug this out of my archives last year when I listened to The Poetry Space_ podcast’s fun episode on Billy Collins. (I highly recommend that episode and that podcast, hosted by the charming pair of Katie Dozier and Timothy Green!) Now, here is my “Billy Collins” poem, from five years ago:

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“Billy Collins”

Testing, 1, 2, 3.
Check, check, 1, 2.
I require a working microphone.

Every retiree poet in my workshop wants to be Billy Collins.
Why in the hell they do I’ve no idea!
Every poet I know wants to be remembered like T.S. Eliot.
Are they somehow unaware of Eliot’s darker sides?

No poet I know wants to emulate Ezra Pound,
or, rather, be remembered exactly like Pound
(since they try to emulate him unfortunately often),
especially in our current political climate,
though Pound produced books full of poetry
(some of it good, some of it great, most of it neither),
and the man brought us Eliot and “Prufrock,”
he and POETRY Magazine that is.
Still, I believe few would say Pound did not deserve his fate.

Every novelist I know wants to be Stephen King.
No, I have that wrong. They want to be popular like King.
However, every novelist I know, well, to be honest,
would rather be remembered like Edgar Allan Poe.
Well, most of them are actually more pretentious than that.
Far more pretentious, I will double down.
In what ways they are pretentious, I won’t record--
they won’t be remembered. Will I be remembered?

To be fair to King, we remember one writer,
one Samuel Clemens, as great, but the critics of his day
often saw him as less than that, though now every writer
I know would kill for their readers to think of them
in the same thought as Mr. Mark Twain.

That being said, all the good writing instruction bits
of King’s On Writing King just quoted directly
from Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style.
The value of On Writing, that little book, lies mostly
in its memoir moments, which can be helpful,
even for those who dislike old Stephen.
They have certainly helped me, time to time.

I have said every poet, every novelist, every writer I know,
but I do not mean to make my statements overly universal,
and, yes, I am aware my circle of acquaintances . . .
my circle remains pitifully small.

The trouble with poetry?
The trouble with me, more like.
The trouble with me and my ski mask.

Oh, we live in the midst of a remix culture--
the art of the mash-up, a burgeoning metamodernism--
some say, some in my narrow circle of acquaintances.

Sometimes when people request of me
my favorite poets, I want to offer
“Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell,
Poly Styrene and Patti Smith,”
but I know not if my motives are pure.

(I usually find myself artistically attracted
to ornery, reckless artists--like Dylan,
like Mitchell, like Marianne, like Jimi Hendrix,
like Michael, like Omari, like Della and Nelson’s son--
but my life does not always follow suit.
The love of my life is more of a Joan Baez,
or maybe Meg White with Leonard Cohen’s spirit.)

Besides, I feel I should answer with “real” poets.
That is what “they” expect, isn’t it?

When I first began writing publicly,
I named myself after the Irishman Michael Collins.
Liam Neeson plays him toweringly in the movie,
and the real man was a sort of tragic hero.
Isn’t that grand? I know it's immature,
and I suppose I was as foolish as can be.
Billy Collins fell into my hero thoughts once,
for a minute, but he has left them for now,
maybe because he couldn’t be much cornier.

Billy Collins commands us to study the masters:
Chaucer (1400), Spenser (1599), Shakespeare (1616),
Donne (1631), Herbert (1633), Milton (1674),
Wordsworth (1850), Browning (1861), Tennyson (1892).
He also recommends, of course,
Whitman (1892) and Frost (1963),
to whom Collins bears a closer resemblance,
a feeling of home when you read him/read them.

Collins once said, “Self-expression is wildly overrated,”
and I both wish and do not wish to believe him.

Will Collins be remembered in the years to come
as we remember the masters of ages past?
Perhaps? He is one of our most famous poets alive,
one of our only contemporary poets popular,
especially with a certain Boomer crowd,
yet some critics and some academics love him too.
He is a success of some kind, no doubt.

Will anyone remember me?
I am afraid not.
I need a better microphone.

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In the previous 5 weeks that the Substack The Flummoxed has been live officially, I have posted new items at an average of 3 per week. I am now going to continue that pace but more consistently: every Monday, Wednesday (every other Wednesday will be a podcast episode), and Friday. Until I both run out of good backlog material to post and need to slow down for personal and/or professional reasons. Thank you for reading!