Billy Collins is on a crusade against 'difficult' poetry, but has he gone a step too far by taking on the Irish, asks Belinda McKeon.
At 11 o'clock on a Saturday morning, Billy Collins, former US poet laureate and one of the best-selling poets in the world, walks into the library in the US Ambassador's residence in the Phoenix Park and announces that he has spent the last hour being chased by an ape across a river. Or maybe it was a bear. Collins isn't certain, but he's still a little bleary-eyed from the experience.
Collins has just two days in Dublin - he has been flown here by the ambassador, Thomas Foley, for a dinner in his honour at the residence - and the jet-lag is hitting him with gusto. So much so, he says, that he's glad of the chance to do an interview, if it takes him away from marauding animals - not to mention his own marauding body-clock - for a while.
That Collins has woken up looking forward to an interview is a sign of how truly disoriented he must be. For Collins, a writer whose popular success has rendered him the American media's first port of call whenever poetry-related soundbites are required (a fate truly sealed when his 2001 collection, Sailing Alone Around the Room, received a rumoured $1m advance), interviews are often an exhausting experience.
"I remember one radio show, in New Mexico, where I sat down and the presenter said: 'So. Poetry . . . ?'" Collins shakes his head. "And that was the question. That was what I was supposed to run with. So I looked at him, and I said, 'So. Radio . . . ?'"
Funny but pointed; light of touch but firm of hand; it sounds as though Collins's rejoinder to the unfortunate radio presenter was, after all, as good an introduction as any to his thinking on poetry. Collins, with his plain-spoken style, heavy on the witticisms and low on politics, is a favourite of National Public Radio and of programmes such as Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion.
He has consequently won millions of fans for his collections and recordings; Collins's poetry treats the matters of everyday life with a droll wit and an obstinate directness. It's poetry which goes out of its way to welcome its reader; in fact, it's poetry which crosses the street to walk with its reader, talking animatedly all the while. Collins doesn't like the word "accessible", preferring the warmer "hospitable" - the notion of accessibility makes him think, he has said, of a ramp for people challenged by poetry - but it is slung at him regularly all the same, along with distinctly less kind designations; one recent commentator dismissed him as a "spoken-word artist for the older mortgage-holding listener", and neither was the New York Timeswriter who dubbed him a "stand-up poet" in 2001 being entirely complimentary.
The ease and transparency with which Collins's poetry offers itself to its reader is at once its highest point and its greatest vulnerability, easily as likely to lead the reader to a sudden, unforgiving drop into insipidness as it is to propel them along a rich and surprising route. This is the danger. But Collins stands by his approach; by beginning a poem at a point of clear visibility, he says, he has a better chance of successfully complicating the journey later on.
"My poems begin in such a flat way that something has to develop," he says. "Otherwise, we're going to be stuck." Flatness: not, you would imagine, a great starting-point for a poem. What does Collins mean by the term? "Well, most of them start with something kind of ordinary. Some version of 'I'm sitting here, looking out at the flowers'. Something kind of simple that gets people oriented. And then, I want to get away from that, I want to leave the reader a little disoriented. And I think one of the pleasures of poetry is being a little bewildered at the end of the poem. But there's a lot of poetry that makes me bewildered right in the beginning. And that's too early for me. I like to start knowing where I am, and then get led astray."
What Collins is easing into into here, is his often-stated - and often over-simplified - gripe with poetry, which is much less than plain-spoken, poetry which plays havoc with language and with form, poetry which is willing to reveal little of itself even to the reader who works to the point of migraine to try and unravel its meaning.
The risk of pretentiousness seems genuinely to horrify Collins, coming only second to the presumptuousness of nakedly autobiographical writing ("why would anybody be interested in what you are thinking or feeling?") as a crime against poetry. In his introduction to Poetry 180, an anthology of a poem a day for high-school students, which was his most high-profile project during his 2001-2003 poet laureate term, Collins argues for ways into a poem other than the explication and interpretation loved by the classroom and the critic; he argues for the virtues of metre, sound, metaphor, for imaginative travel. Literary devices obsessed with the hunt for meaning, he says, "form a field of barbed wire" that the reader must crawl under, with every poem coming to seem "a failed act of communication", since all energies focus on the notion that the poet is trying to say something which cannot yet be seen.
The fault, then, lies partly with the way poetry is taught, and partly with the way it is read; but for Collins, a large degree of the blame falls also on the shoulders of poetry itself - at least of poetry which, as he sees it, courts pompous fantasies of abstruseness and of erudition. "Difficult" is the shorthand often applied to such poetry, and to the type of poetry against which Collins's crusade, such as it is, is directed. But it's not that he abhors difficult poetry, Collins insists. John Ashbery, whose poetry has invented a whole new architecture of language and of self-awareness, is one of his favourite poets (WS Merwin and Jorie Graham are two others). It's just, he says, that often difficult poetry is the easiest, least considered poetry of all.
"I went to graduate school," he says. "I got a PhD in literature. So obviously I've got some taste for explication and for what happens when your head is in contact with a difficult text. But let's say that with Ashbery or Graham, they're both doing something that's impossible for me to do. It's a verbal feat and also a way of receiving things that I'm incapable of. And that in itself is sort of humbling. But then, I read a lot of difficult poetry, not usually to the end, but I'm exposed to a lot of difficult poetry that, I kind of have a feeling, that I could do that. And so I'm not interested in it. But with these other poets, I see that the difficulty is special, it's performative, and it's way beyond my reach."
Firmly within Collins's grasp, however, are the arts of satire and parody, both of which he recruits often. In several of his poems, the same arch wit which surveys the world and its doings zones in, with an arguably even sharper eye, on the art of poetry itself, on its practitioners and its forms; the style of Wallace Stevens, his strongest influence as a young poet, came in for the deadpan treatment at one point, as did that of Yeats, as did the poor old villanelle - to mock the form's intricacies, Collins invented a spoof form called the paradelle, which proved more successful than even he could have imagined; it now has its own anthology, with a faux-historical introduction written by him.
But it's another spot of satire which must come under the microscope today; the poem Irish Poetry, published last year in the Chicago magazine Poetry, which pokes fun at what Collins perceives to be the cliches of its subject matter. Depending on the reverence with which you regard certain strains of contemporary Irish poetry, Collins's skit is either a welcome dig or a bloody cheek; with a "pale hood of sky", a day of clabbering light, a forked tree and a herd of "phosphorescent heifers", and finishing with a description of an afternoon as "lambent, corrugated, puddle-mad", it paints the native tradition as mordant, predictable and bloated.
Collins, looking just a touch uncomfortable, says he was surprised not to receive more feedback, after its appearance, from Irish poets - it was intended as a "playful" gesture, he says. "It was satirising a kind of sound, a poetry where sound is taken over, where the acoustic level of the poem is so loud or so syllable-conscious that it starts to reverberate with all the sound complexity. It was a taking off of poetry that seems overly designed."
Speaking about it before its publication, he hinted that the poem would bear signs of one poet's style in particular. Are he and a certain Nobel Laureate on speaking terms? "I've met Seamus Heaney a number of times, and we're acquaintances, and I'm an admirer," says Collins. "You have to admire something to write a parody of it. Because you have to have gotten inside of it to parody it."
Still, the poem is one which seems to give anxiety to Collins, who has Irish roots - one set of grandparents from Cork, the other from Waterford, a father who wanted to forget all about Ireland and a mother who talked little about it; the effect of his parents' indifference was to eventually fuel Collins's own interest in the country, and he has spent several summers here since the 1980s, teaching poetry workshops in UCD, NUIG and at the Burren College of Art.
But back to Irish Poetry. How did I find it, he wants to know? (The website of Poetrymagazine, if you're interested.) Did I think it sounded like an Irish poem? Perhaps best not to comment, but it's certainly not on the schedule that evening, after the Ambassador's dinner, when Collins, along with the Irish poets Brendan Kennelly and Mary O'Malley, gives a brief reading.
There are plenty of wry lines, and plenty of wry laughter, but not a phosphorescent heifer in sight. Nor, indeed, a phosphorescent Heaney.
The Trouble With Poetry and other poems by Billy Collins is out now on Picador, £8.99
