Easy Readin' Poet #3: Billy Collins

I wrote about this guy before, and this is what I said:

Accessible, charming, brilliant. A romp. If humour columnists Josh Freed (Montreal Gazette) or Gary Lautens (Toronto Star) wrote poetry, this is how they would write. Actually, I find a lien to Italo Calvino. In particular, Mr. Palomar.

I was talking, by the way, about his 2002 new & selected, Sleeping Alone Around the Room. I enjoy the once-through, a few poems the twice-through, but three times, well... comparisons come to mind of eating candy floss. This ex-Poet Laureate, though, is too easy to diss. Here's a personal favourite:

PURITY

My favorite time to write is in the late afternoon,
weekdays, particularly Wednesdays.
This is how I go about it:
I take a fresh pot of tea into my study and close the door.
Then I remove my clothes and leave them in a pile
as if I had melted to death and my legacy consisted of only
a white shirt, a pair of pants, and a pot of cold tea.

Then I remove my flesh and hang it over a chair.
I slide it off my bones like a silken garment.
I do this so that what I write will be pure,
completely rinsed of the carnal,
uncontaminated by the preoccupations of the body.

Finally I remove each of my organs and arrange them
on a small table near the window.
I do not want to hear their ancient rhythms
when I am trying to tap out my own drumbeat.

Now I sit down at at the desk, ready to begin.
I am entirely pure: nothing but a skeleton at a typewriter.

I should mention that sometimes I leave my penis on.
I find it difficult to ignore the temptation.
Then I am a skeleton with a penis at a typewriter.

In this condition I write extraordinary love poems,
most of them exploiting the connection between sex and death.

I am concentration itself: I exist in a universe
where there is nothing but sex, death, and typewriting.

After a spell of this I remove my penis too.
Then I am all skull and bones typing into the afternoon.
Just the absolute essentials, no flounces.
Now I write only about death, most classical of themes
in language light as the air between my ribs.

Afterward, I reward myself by going for a drive at sunset.
I replace my organs and slip back into my flesh
and clothes. Then I back the car out of the garage
and speed through woods on winding country roads,
passing stone walls, farmhouses, and frozen ponds,
all perfectly arranged like words in a famous sonnet.

Corey, Tate, Snider, Difficulty

Among the people I have on my blog roll is Josh Corey, a poet who is capable of some pretty stellar expository. Check out his posts starting with Nov. 18. I had never really read James Tate before reading this, but after reading a few poems in my Norton Anthology, I could see exactly what he was talking about vis-a-vis this guy, and ibid for Billy Collins, Sharon Olds, all these easy, popular poets who nevertheless are lauded (with reservations) by the literati, included in major anthologies, etc.
This had lead to a debate between Corey and one Mike Snider about the value of difficulty/abstruseness in poetry. My take on it is that there is a certain degree of difficulty, of challenge, of pushing the limits in poetry that is of value, and the limit varies with eveyone. I like intellectual challenge and scope , arcane vocabulary, purely "expressionist" use of language, etc. My limits go to say, Eliot's Wasteland. Pound, or, among our contemporaries, G.C. Waldrep, poets I find immensely rich and enjoyable. But if poetry becomes too impenetrable, cryptic, private, "cerebral", devoid of evocative imagery -- again, what is "too" is purely personal -- well it tips the scales into a kind of abyss.