Ballistics

Billy Collins And Wallace Stevens At Key West

Billy Collins is unique in his ability to make poetry accessible to many readers. He writes short poems in a simple, witty style that manages to include a good deal of reflection. His volume of poetry "Ballistics" (2008) includes over 50 poems divided into four parts. The poems cover themes such as death and the necessity it brings to make of life what one can and when one can, love, and loneliness. There are little satirical poems such as "Oh, my God!" which mimic the careless ways with language, among other things, of many Americans. Collins' poems also include self-reflexive themes such as the relationship between reader and writer in poetry, (in the poem "August in Paris" and "The Great American Poem" among several others) and the relationship between Collins and other poets, a relationship which involves the nature of writing poetry.

For all its accessibility, Collins' poetry makes substantial use of allusions to earlier poets including, in this volume, Valery, ("January in Paris"), Robert Frost, (several poems including "The Four Moon Planet"); Philip Larkin, ("Aubade", a title shared with a famous Larkin poem) and Wallace Stevens (in the poem "August", Collins refers to his fascination with Stevens. He says:"I went to grammar school for Jesus/and to graduate school for Wallace Stevens.") There are many informative reader reviews and thoughts on the poems in "Ballistics", and I would like to write a review that points out the relationship between Collins and Stevens in this volume by looking at a single poem.

Both Stevens (1879 -- 1955) and Collins set many poems in Florida. "Ballistics" includes a poem called "The Idea of Natural History at Key West". The title is a clear echo of one of Stevens' best poems "The Idea of Order at Key West" and the poems and styles illuminate each other.

Wallace Stevens is a difficult writer, but he has become a revered American poet. "The Idea of Order at Key West" is a meditation on the relationship between imagination and creativity and reality. The major figure in the poem is a beautiful unnamed young woman standing seaside. "She sang beyond the genius of the sea", Stevens begins. He then explores the complex relationship between the girl and her song of the sea and the sea itself. At one point he says:

"then we,
as we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made."

There is more to it, but let us turn to Collins' poem which takes a deflationary approach to Stevens' lofty theme and language. Collins pokes fun at himself. Instead of a beautiful, singing girl, Collins gives us himself:

"When I happened to notice myself
walking naked past a wall-length mirror

.........

I looked like one of those silhouettes
that illustrate the evolution of man"

The poet observes his pot-bellied self: "Was this the beginning of the Great Regression/as the anthropologists of tomorrow would call it?" while he speculates that a "man of the future" might step forward possessing,"a more ample cranium", "a set of talons" or "a pair of useless cherubic wings." Collins' biting conclusion contrasts with Stevens' closing observations in his poem:

"Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The makers rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds."

I hope this short discussion will show how Collins' poetry makes use of the work of his great predecessors, especially Wallace Stevens. It suggests that there is more to Collins' poetry than might appear on the surface. I hope the comparison might also encourage, as Collins would wish, readers to explore other poetry beginning perhaps with Stevens' great poem, "The Idea of Order at Key West".

Robin Friedman