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Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry
by Billy Collins

118 Poems  323 Pages
Random House Trade Paperbacks
www.atrandom.com

 
Reviewed By: Ed Bennett

 

Each year Quill and Parchment dedicates the April issue to “Poets on Poets”. My assignment this month was to review Billy Collins’ latest collection of poetry but I decided not to do so. Having neither the intellect nor the self confidence of Harold Bloom I decided that I will critique Billy Collins some other day. This day and in this issue of a magazine dedicated to poets, I will write instead of a poet’s vision and our own need as poets to make that vision live.

 

Billy Collins was Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 – 2003.For those of you who aspire to this position, supposedly the epitome of recognition of an American Poet by our government, you should know that the position differs from other countries who extend this same honor. The Poet Laureate is not expected to write poems for occasions as they do in the UK. However, while not expected to write an ode praising trickle down economics, the Poet Laureate is expected to raise the awareness of the general public to poetry, usually by undertaking a project with that aim. The Croesian reward for this work is a stipend of $35,000 and a budget large enough to throw a small wine and cheese party, but only once a year. On the positive side, the resources of the Library of Congress back these projects.

 

“Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry” was the result of Billy Collins’ project. During a series of readings at a high school, he was presented with the school newspaper that had an article about poetry. The writer stated: “Whenever I read a modern poem it’s like my brother has his foot on the back of my neck in the swimming pool.” Billy Collins has been writing poetry since 1977. Like nearly all of us, he is averse to inflicting abuse of this type on children so he looked at the poetry that was being assigned in today’s literature curricula with a particular eye toward “modern work”. Essentially, he found the usual list of suspects, (Yeats, Eliot, cummings, Frost) and little else. Essentially, these high school students were reading the same poetry that was assigned to their grandparents forty years earlier.

 

Collins decided to put together a collection of “short, clear contemporary poems which any listener could basically ‘get’ on first hearing – poems whose injection of pleasure is immediate. He collected 180 poems, the amount of days in a high school year, and placed them on the Library of Congress website (www.loc.gov/poetry/180). The website is available to all high school teachers and the intent is to read a poem a day during the daily announcements that are broadcast over the public address system. Students hear poetry without the need to critique, parse or in any way respond. The poem is there for the pleasure of the student, no more, no less. The website is still active and after “Poetry 180” appeared in 2003 in print, it was popular enough to launch a second publication, “180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day”.

 

So how accurate was Billy Collins’ perception about the state of American poetry in the classroom? Were the student’s comments about the pain of reading modern poetry exaggerated? Who speaks for what is to be included in the syllabus used by the literature teachers across this country? Is this book a more progressive look at modern poetry or simply a “dumbing down” of the required work?

 

I went to my own library looking for answers. I found a copy of “The Great Modern Poets: The Best Poetry of Our Times” by Michael Schmidt (2006, Quercus Press). The book was more recent than “Poetry 180” and collected the works of poets in a somewhat chronological order. It began with Thomas Hardy (1840 – 1928) and ended with James Fenton (b. 1949). Of the 49 poets in this book nearly half were born in the 19th century and none were born after 1949. Six were women and two were of African heritage, Langston Hughes of the United States and Derek Walcott of St. Lucia. The representative group of poets was overwhelmingly white, male and the youngest was 61 years old. (For the record, I was in college in the late ‘60s, about the time that Fenton was there.) This is what the accepted canon of “Modern Poetry” looks like and to a 16 year old, this can be a bit daunting.

 

“Poetry 180” presents a very different face to the reader. Admittedly, there was no pressure to include “recognized” poets and no fear that a seminal work of the English language was omitted. What it did do for Collins, however, was to release him from previous collections of this type and allow him to find a more diverse as well as accessible group of poets. There are three times the amount of women represented here and a quick scan of last names reveals Hispanic, Asian and Native American writers. There is the usual gravitas of writers like Philip Levine , John Hollander and Charles Simic but they are interspersed among poems such as Thomas Lux’ “The Man into Whose Yard You Should Not Hit Your Ball” and Robert Hershon’s “Sentimental Moments or Why Did the Baguette Cross the Road?”. Collins could also choose his poems from such outside-the-box writers like Charles Bukowski and John Updike, an unexpected choice in a poetry anthology. Probably the most impressive feature of this anthology is the way much of the poetry speaks about everyday events. Shoshauna Shy’s “Bringing My Son to the Police Station to Be Fingerprinted”,Leroy V. Quintana’s “Poem for Salt”. Hal Sirowitz’ “I Finally Managed to Speak to Her” and Nicholas Christopher’s “Through the Window of the All-Night Restaurant” give a sharp yet poignant image of what each of us has gone through. Nowhere in this book is a long ramble on old age a la “Prufrock” or Achilles pondering the strength of his shield. Billy Collins has thrown open the windows  of the Academy and has allowed the breeze of contemporary poetry to refresh his readers.

 

What we have here is, on the face of it, an anthology of good poetry that is available to the reader without a deep grounding in the Classics. It seems, though, that between the pages of this book lies a challenge to all of us. The modern poetry section of our children’s curriculum in English is an adventure in literary antiquity. Consequently, exposing our children to POETRY with a capital “P” is tedious for them. Is Robert Frost important? Yes, definitely. Should we still teach the giants of literature? Yes, but as a stepping stone. Poetry did not stop in 1940. It is alive and well on the web and in small journals slowly yellowing on the book racks. Is Dorianne Laux more important than Marianne Moore? I don’t know but I think our children should be exposed to both. They should learn the basics from the established masters but they should see as well that poetry plays with language and can be light hearted as well as serious.

 

Each state has a Board of Regents who establishes the curriculum that is taught in schools across the state. Admittedly, they are dedicated people who devote their lives to education. But sometimes they get it wrong.  Just recently the Board of Regents of the State of Texas decided to drop Thomas Jefferson’s name from those who were part of “The Enlightenment”. Whether the decision was politically motivated or not, it was not correct and will have an effect on students of Texas. Updating the syllabus in poetry would require that the Regents of each state keep abreast of the state of poetry in order to make an informed decision. There is no reason why good, established poets like Ted Kooser or Bob Hickock or Rita Dove need to be kept secret.

 

Billy Collins’ nomination to the position of Poet Laureate was not without comment from some critics who thought him too frivolous. I speak as a native New Yorker when I say that there was nothing frivolous about his poem “The Names”, a tribute to the people who died in the World Trade Center on September 11th. Billy Collins believes that poetry should be an enjoyment and accessible to every one of us. If it is kept in The Academy, it becomes more archaeology that literature. Each one of us, especially those of us with children in high school (or grandchildren, for that matter) should make ourselves heard on this issue. Contemporary poetry is a vibrant art. We need to tell this to the educators making the choices for our children in this field.

 

The “Poetry 180” program is still available on the Library of Congress website. Let your local school know about it. It is free and the only investment is an additional two or three minutes during the daily announcements. On our part, it requires a passion for the art of writing and a willingness to display that passion. As Collins himself says: “Clarity is the real risk of poetry. To be clear means opening yourself up to judgement, The willfully obscure poem is a hiding place where the poet can elude the reader…” It is time for poetry to come out into the sunlight.              

 


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