Contemporary
It is too late in the day
to make up a fable about a princess
and a toad with a jewel in its forehead,
and the time has passed for concocting
a saga with warriors sweeping across the tundra
and the lone hero balancing on an ice floe.
The windows of the sonnet are painted shut,
and the last sailor has drowned
in the last line of the final ballad.
But there is still time to speak to the heart
as it goes into battle again
with no weapon, defeated every time,
brought to its knees by each season,
knocked out by a bird in a cage,
or a girl on the floor lost in a drawing.
Even in this painted room
with and autumn evening setting in,
it succumbed again- this time,
to what happens to lie on the kitchen table:
an orange, an unlit candle,
and the times of a movie re-traced in pencil.
Billy Collins’s level of fame is almost unprecedented in the world of contemporary poetry: his readings regularly sell out, and he received a six-figure advance when he moved publishers in the late 1990s. He served two terms as the US poet laureate, from 2001-2003, was New York State poet laureate from 2004-2006, and is a regular guest on National Public Radio programs. In 2002, as US poet laureate, Collins was asked to write a poem commemorating the first anniversary of the fall of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center on September 11. The reading was in front of a joint session of Congress held outside of Washington, DC. Though Collins published throughout the 1980s, it was his fourth book, Questions about Angels (1991), that propelled him into the literary spotlight. The collection was selected by poet Ed Hirsch for the 1990 National Poetry Series. Collins’s subsequent work has been regularly lauded for its ability to connect with readers. Discussing Picnic, Lightning (1998) and its predecessor, The Art of Drowning (1995), John Taylor noted that Collins’s skillful, smooth style and inventive subject matter “helps us feel the mystery of being alive.” Taylor added: “Rarely has anyone written poems that appear so transparent on the surface yet become so ambiguous, thought-provoking, or simply wise once the reader has peered into the depths.” His books include Taking off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes (2000), Nine Horses: Poems (2002), The Trouble with Poetry (2005), Ballistics (2008), Horoscopes for the Dead (2011), Aimless Love (2013), and The Rain in Portugal (2016) have continued to offer poems that mix humor with insight. Reviewing Nine Horses for the New York Times, Mary Jo Salter commented that Collins’s “originality derives, it seems, from the marriage of a loopy, occasionally surreal imagination … to an ordinary life observed in just a few ordinary words.” She added that “one appeal of the typical Collins poem is that it’s less able to help you memorize it than to help you to remember, for a little while anyway, your own life.” But Collins’s emphasis on writing—and writing “ordinary life” at that—can, for some critics, make his poetry seem pedestrian or one-note. However, many readers find Collins a source of warmth, wit, and surprisingly sure technique, and reviewers have consistently noted how Collins’s poems manifest a literal concern for their readers. John Deming in Cold Front Mag has discussed Collins’s concern for those reading his poems because “the transmission of poem to head takes place always elsewhere and in silence, in the mysterious space where poems live…Collins lets us access this place with alarming graciousness, and the openness of his voice probably helps account for his popularity.” Poet-critic Richard Howard has said of Collins: “He has a remarkably American voice…that one recognizes immediately as being of the moment and yet has real validity besides, reaching very far into what verse can do.” Collins has described himself as “reader conscious”: “I have one reader in mind, someone who is in the room with me, and who I’m talking to, and I want to make sure I don’t talk too fast, or too glibly. Usually I try to create a hospitable tone at the beginning of a poem. Stepping from the title to the first lines is like stepping into a canoe. A lot of things can go wrong.” Collins further related: “I think my work has to do with a sense that we are attempting, all the time, to create a logical, rational path through the day. To the left and right there are an amazing set of distractions that we usually can’t afford to follow. But the poet is willing to stop anywhere.”