I mean, could you imagine NBC’s Nightly News with Robert Pinsky, Forbes Magazine: “The Poetry Issue,” or Sean Penn winning an Academy Award for his portrayal of “the speaker” in the film adaptation of Ilya Kaminsky’s, Dancing in Odessa? Of course, Pinsky did appear as a token judge of a Metaphor-Off on an episode of the Colbert Report, James Franco played Allen Ginsberg in the 2009 film Howl, and the film The Hurt Locker, which borrowed its title from a poem by Brian Turner, won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2010. And currently, PBS and NPR provide many occasions for contemporary poets to reach the larger American audience. I’ve seen Terrance Hayes reading a poem on the Charlie Rose Show, an episode of American Experience on Whitman that featured big names like Yusef Komunyakaa, Martin Espada, and Billy Collins, and no doubt The Writer’s Almanac has introduced contemporary poets big and small to an average audience of over two million listeners. But aside from these infrequent, quasi-mainstream surfacings, poetry still almost exclusively lives and breathes with the rest of the high arts on university campuses across the country.

 
Some might feel compelled to blame America’s public education system for poetry’s limited readership, and no doubt the system often obfuscates the craft by neglecting to teach poets who haven’t been fully vetted for more than 100 years. But then again, maybe it’s foolish to even imagine an American poetry readership that isn’t decidedly small in stature. I remember reading an interview with Robert Hass on Guernica Magazine’s website where he compared publishing figures from American poetry’s heyday at the beginning of the 1900’s (when Emily Dickinson’s first book of poems became a best-seller) to present day standards and found that not much has really changed in terms of audience. As Hass says, “her first book of poems went through eleven editions of a print run of about 400…for a country that had fifty million people in it. Now a first print run for a first book is maybe 2,000? So that’s a five-time increase in the expectation of readership. Probably the audience is almost exactly the same size as it was in 1900, if you just took that one example” (Read full Guernica Interview with Robert Hass).

 
But if a liberal education has at least some connection with building a poetry readership (as it surely did a hundred years ago), then with so many more American’s graduating with four-year-degrees from universities across the country, shouldn’t there be a respectively larger readership than there was in 1900? Maybe the problem then is not educational but cultural. Maybe entertainment, which used to be defined as an occasion to “better oneself,” was permanently redefined by the rollercoaster to suit more passive amusements like radio, television and cinema. Maybe the uniquely empathetic experience that poetry provides is asking too much from the still championed rugged individualism that gave birth to this country. Maybe the more gifted a person is with language in America, the more likely they are not to be trusted. Maybe poetry is bound to suffer the same fate as the internationally beloved sport of futbol—try as they might to repackage it, some connections were never meant to be forged.
Let’s be clear, I believe there will always be a want for connection, for community, at the very heart of the act of writing poetry; but as a poet I can say it’s also true that during the loneliest, most unshaven hours of composition or revision there already exists a private dialogue with the universe: a codified pattern of human experience falling apart into lines. And despite the familiar April cry for the American public to reinvest in their literary present by attending readings, buying books and supporting the literary arts, poetry will always have very simple desires; as Eliot said: “it remains, all the same, one person talking to another.” Poetry is intimate, wary of communal ballyhoos and calls to arms, and it usually waits for the air-raid sirens to whir quietly down before opening its mouth to speak. Poetry is, without a doubt, the purest and keenest handler of language; the best of it seeks a larger community without ever despairing for one.

 
Last night before bed, I read aloud a few of the early sections of Whitman’s “Song of Myself” (the 1855 version, and “the purest text” by Malcolm Cowley’s estimation) to my very sleepy and pregnant wife and our little, sex-yet-undetermined-bun-in-the-oven wunderkind. The prenatal poetry readings have become a hallmark of our bedtime routine, Regina turning her belly towards me while I prop up on one elbow and read. Last night, I had the good fortune to rediscover (mid-recitation) a beautiful moment that could exist no place other than poetry: “I and this mystery here we stand” (I remember imparting the slightest pause between mystery and here, as though Whitman had crafted a doorway at that exact spot in the syntax for me to enter into the poem). And when I read it, I did so, slowly, with great pains taken towards pronunciation and clarity. Call it my humble attempt to precoddle our unborn into language.
In those intimate moments with Whitman my wife and our unborn child, I’m all but convinced that the American poetry community is right where it needs to be; that it is greater than the oases of intrepid publishers, independent bookstores, MFA programs and AWP conferences scattered across the American wasteland; that it is actually growing and stretching out across centuries at an alarming rate. So this April, I’m choosing to include all the dead American poets into my estimation of the community’s overall health. Dead poets like Whitman are a curious and perpetually blossoming group that is literally ignored in such discussions. But I charge you to go to your bookshelf, open any Norton Anthology and see what a community they make. They were writing for all of us, their community, the same as they were writing for their contemporaries; and so what if the dead Whitmans, Dickinsons, Frosts, etc, aren’t coming to your next poetry reading and book signing? At least they’ll be powerless to stop you from raiding their coffers in the latter hours of revision.

Random House (2011) $24  (hardback)

Reviewed by James Crews

Billy Collins’ ninth collection of poetry pokes and prods the idea of mortality—the author’s as well as our own—more than in any of his previous books. This one opens with a watchful speaker standing, “before the joined grave of my parents,” he tells us, and—wait for it—asking them what they think of his new glasses. With this loaded image of spectacles and the pseudo-serious author photo in which Collins pensively chews on what we presume are those new glasses, he’s telling us he still sees the world in his characteristic playful way, but these days it’s with a greater sense of life’s transience that he sees the world. Indeed, Horoscopes brims with the wry humor and colloquial language that have won Collins such a wide readership—something that seldom happens for poets (unless you’re a rock-star-turned-poet like Jewel or Billy Corgan).

One of the best poems in Horoscopes for the Dead—an apt and catchy title if ever there was one—is “Memento Mori,” which begins,

It doesn’t take much to remind me
what a mayfly I am,
what a soap bubble floating over the children’s party.

Standing under the bones of a dinosaur
in a museum does the trick every time
or confronting in a vitrine a rock from the moon.

In this book, we see a speaker having fun with the realization that he too has become the dinosaur, an old man wandering among “the fans of palmettos, or the bright pink hibiscus” of the Florida he often mentions, musing in “The Flaneur,” “Who needs Europe?” and then watching “. . . as a boy flew by on a skateboard/ and I fell into a reverie on the folly of youth/ and the tender, distressing estrangement of my life.” But the poem, “Hangover,” is about as close as Collins gets to distress or anger as he decrees cantankerously that “every child who is playing Marco Polo/ in the swimming pool of this motel” should be required to read a thick biography of Marco Polo as well as several fine-printed histories of Venice and China. After that, he goes on,

each child would be quizzed
by me then executed by drowning
regardless how much they managed
to retain . . .

It’s not hard to see why Billy Collins, U.S. Poet Laureate from 2001-2003, is America’s bestselling, most popular poet; he writes poems just about anyone can read and appreciate. Though he weathers some criticism for employing many of the same strategies over and over in his poems, we can begrudge him a bit of redundancy if the formula is working—and of course, it still is. He looks out at the mutilated world with childlike fascination and clarity and makes music out of the quotidian, capturing universal experiences we perhaps didn’t realize someone else was also having. More often than not, the pieces in Horoscopes for the Dead are occasioned by a man sitting alone on a rock, or on a dock, and staring out at a calm lake. And there are the usual poems about his dog, as well as a poem in which he predictably likens himself to a mouse, “ducking like a culprit/ into an opening in a stone wall,” and there’s one poem—one can scarcely call it a poem—“Feedback,” which is all punch line and cutesiness:

The woman who wrote from Phoenix
after my reading there

to tell me they were all still talking about it

just wrote again
to tell me that they had stopped.

But Collins shows us time and again in poems like “Arithmetic” that he knows exactly what he’s up to, and he’s not afraid to repeat himself, letting his lines unfold slowly and tenderly for his readers so we too can see just where he’s headed:

I spend a little time nearly every day
on a gray wooden dock
on the edge of a wide lake, thinly curtained by reeds.

And if there is nothing on my mind
but the motion of the wavelets
and the high shape-shifting of clouds,

I look out at the whole picture
and divide the scene into what was here
five hundred years ago and what was not.

It becomes apparent once more in this book that Collins is not just writing for the appreciation of other poets (as writers often do these days); his project is a poetics for the guy in the pickup, the grand-dad in the La-Z-Boy, the mother reading on the plane. He said once in a lecture that he believes there are two kinds of poets—those like cats, who slink around corners and seem to need the attention of no one, and those like dogs, always staring up plaintively from the page, ever needful of the love and attention of their readers. It’s a pleasure to be in the gentle but capable hands of a master of the latter camp, as so many of these poems signal us right from the beginning to follow them for a walk out in the surprisingly fresh air. Consider the opening lines of “Riverside, California”:

I would have to say that the crown
resting on the head of my first acid trip
was the moment I went down on one knee
backstage at the Top Hat Lounge
and proposed marriage to all three Ikettes.

Even while cycling through a Florida cemetery, “wheeling past the headstones,” this poet finds ample reason for joy as he imagines the people buried there whose carved names are their only earthly remnants. “I wish I could take you all for a ride,” he says to them, letting us know in his not-so-sly way, he probably means the rest of us too. “Ride with me along these halls of the dead,” he says, “ . . . as some crows flap in the blue overhead/ and the spokes of my wheels catch the dazzling sun.”

Collins, like Ted Kooser and Stephen Dunn, captures those private, unhurried moments we so seldom take for ourselves in these technology-drenched, social networked times. In “Vocation,” he tells us his job will always have been

keeping an eye on things
whether they existed or not,
recumbent under the random stars.

In conjuring such a generous world on the page, Collins also creates a kind of comforting order and sense of play, which readers can use to resist the chaos otherwise pressing in around us. His critics will squawk that he’s too accessible, that the poems in Horoscopes for the Dead unfurl a bit too neatly and easily. But for this poet, that’s the point.