Books Ain’t I a Stinker?
posted by on June 30 at 13:00 PM
Don’t get me wrong: just this weekend, I was discussing the timeless joy of Loony Tunes cartoons. The one where Bugs Bunny takes on the opera singer is second in my heart only to the one where he goes bullfighting. Or maybe “What’s Opera, Doc?” is my favorite of all time.
But Billy Collins, former Poet Laureate of the United States, has a story in the Wall Street Journal about how inspired he has been by those early Warner Brothers cartoons:
Bugs would do the impossible by jumping out of the frame and landing on the drawing board of the cartoonist who was at work creating him. This freedom to transcend the laws of basic physics, to hop around in time and space, and to skip from one dimension to another has long been a crucial aspect of imaginative poetry.
I really don’t like Billy Collins at all. He’s the kind of whimsical poet—packed with thoughts that are, you know, deep, but not too deep, things that could all be prefaced by “Didja ever notice?”—who’s murdering poetry by trying to make it accessible. He’s the ‘hip’ substitute teacher who tries to convince the students that World War I was really all about sex.
But whatever. The worst part of Collins’ article is that it has little poems for each of the Looney Tunes characters. From “Elmer”:
Later he will have his nap,/the enormous pink head/rolling on the pillow/dreaming again of the wabbit,/the private carrot patch.
I just wish that Billy Collins would stop trying to save poetry. It’s embarrassing to watch.
The greatest threat to poetry today is the belief that everybody has something to say, anybody can write and that there are no rules. Good poetry is as difficult to write as it is rare.
In fairness to Collins, the poems are from a 1977 collection. They are not good. But neither was 1977. A bit of a let-down after the excitement of the Bicentennial.
I am dismayed that a man who would call himself "Billy" would ever become the poet laureate. When me and my friends read his name, we like to say it as read in this poem we wrote. Enjoy.
Religion
I imagine Jesus in a stripclub
bald but bearding
seated amongst the dispossessed
with a wad of twenties nonetheless.
A man named Paul sits beside him
and asks for a cigarette.
"Hey. Didn't we go to High School?"
"... Yeah. But that was a long time ago."
"Billy?"
There is nothing worse than Billy Collins. Coldplay, John McCain, Oliver Stone, being eaten alive by nutrias, none of this comes close. He is unsurpassed in his awfulness.
The fact that George Bush Jr. chose him as our country's poet laureate says plenty.
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