By John Allen

“Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others. Then we might even come to see that it is our veneration for what has already been created, however beautiful and valid it may be, that petrifies us.”
—Antonin Artaud

“Billy Collins writes lovely poems--lovely.  Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seems, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides.”
—John Updike

“Mr. Collins is funny without being silly, moving without being silly, and brainy without being silly. If only he were silly, we should know how to ‘place’ him. But he is merely--merely!--funny, moving, brainy. That will have to do.”
—Richard Howard

The miles between these two quotes—one by an uncompromising revolutionary who lived his entire life in a state of savage commitment to the spirit of revolt, which is, as we have all conveniently forgotten, both the flame of life and the genesis of poetry itself—and the other by a fossilized academic who is fawning over the work of a Hallmark Card pugilist.  Only in this country could a lightweight like Collins become the U.S. Poet Laureate—not that that means anything anymore anyway.  “I is Another.” Rimbaud said: “The brass is not at fault for awakening the trumpet.”   

From a revolutionary perspective, contemporary poetry now is rather akin to preparing for a particularly excruciating Sunday.  We know we will be bored, that dead time will sweat through every pore until we mercifully lose consciousness; and so we set the alarm clock and bow on our pillow in helpless resignation.  

None of us can forget that both the Situationists and the Surrealists had one goal, one focal point by which everything else was judged: whether life had transformed into poetry or not by whatever means possible.  But in a world where culture suffocates free perception—indeed, the very idea of it is seen as a novelty, or something to be done only in “meditation” or similar rainbow mysticism.  Breton often mentioned both Rimbaud and Marx in the same sentence, addressing thousands of revolutionaries: “Rimbaud said, “Change Life.”  Marx said, “Transform the World.”  These two watchwords are one for us.”  How deliciously naive that seems in retrospect—most so called “socialists” have no more interest in imaginative art than the common man, and often the poet can only ineffectually dabble in matters of actual proletarian revolution, playing along but never fully understanding it.  (Andre Breton, incidentally, is a perfect example).     

Let’s take a look at the work of Mr. Collins.  Here is a poem that got him nominated for a Pushcart Prize:

On Turning Ten
by Billy Collins

The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I’m coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headache I get from reading in bad light---
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.

You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a pirate.

But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned agatinst the garage as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.

This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I would shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.

Hmm.  Well.  We couldn’t have gotten more stereotypical if we had ordered DVD’s of “Leave It To Beaver” and recorded some of the dialogue—what’s next, a poem about the first time his aunt gave him candy?  But he is not to blame himself—he is only a symptom of a culture determined to resurrect the dead icons, the spectacle of wholesomeness which was a lie to begin with.   Even at the cost of suffocation, the murder of every subjective impulse man has and treasures, can we honor saccharine drivel like this and call it true poetry, that which explores and pushes to change life.  Artaud, Rimbaud and Poe spent their lives in poverty and almost unimaginable suffering: this man is the first individual in history to earn six figures from poetry.

Someone who is dead now once decided to try her hand at poetry because I talked about it to so much.  The result was the following:

there are petals on the flower
that fall down and turn black
it is nice out sunny like an egg
the sun looks like yolk
but there is no one here
no one out there
no one here at all

Simple, yes, structurally correct, perhaps not.  But each line bleeds with the passion of the imagination, the struggle to understand the excruciating suffering that this culture produces--that very same suffering that ended her life so early.  How many more poems of this sort do we need to realize the consequences of our academic exclusiveness, our fossilization of what is most sacred?  I cannot help but feel this poem is far superior to Collins’.  I have never been able to remove it from my notebook, and have it lodged there with masking tape.  

If I was looking through any other lens but that of the SI, I will say without shame or qualifications that I would stop writing poetry entirely—the way Rimbaud did.  The capitalist ethos that we live in cares nothing for poets or poetry.  The poet does not work, so what of him?  The destructive, dionysian force of the word as incantation must be used against the powers that be.  Anything else is mere word play.  I put my hope in this knowing it will probably never occur.  

So long, losers.