The Trouble With Poetry - And Other Poems

by Billy Collins

Playfulness, spare elegance, and wit epitomize the poetry of Billy Collins. With his distinct voice and accessible language, America's two-term Poet Laureate has opened the door to poetry for countless people for whom it might otherwise remain closed.

Like the present book's title, Collins's poems are filled with mischief, humor, and irony, "Poetry speaks to all people, it is said, but here I would like to address / only those in my own time zone"-but also with quiet observation, intense wonder, and a reverence for the everyday: "The birds are in their trees, / the toast is in the toaster, / and the poets are at their windows. / They are at their windows in every section of the tangerine of earth-the Chinese poets looking up at the moon, / the American poets gazing out / at the pink and blue ribbons of sunrise."

Through simple language, Collins shows that good poetry doesn't have to be obscure or incomprehensible, qualities that are perhaps the real trouble with most "serious" poetry: "By now, it should go without saying / that what the oven is to the baker / and the berry-stained blouse to the drycleaner / so the window is to the poet."

In this dazzling new collection, his first in three years, Collins explores boyhood, jazz, love, the passage of time, and, of course, writing-themes familiar to Collins's fans but made new here. Gorgeous, funny, and deeply empathetic, Billy Collins's poetry is a window through which we see our lives as if for the first time.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Humor, Adult, American, Book Club, Contemporary

88 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

William James Collins is an American poet who served as the Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. He was a Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York, retiring in 2016. Collins was recognized as a Literary Lion of the New York Public Library (1992) and selected as the New York State Poet for 2004 through 2006. In 2016, Collins was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. As of 2020, he is a teacher in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton.

Reviews

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't generally like poetry.
Oh, perhaps a little Robert Frost,
and some say parts of the Bible are poetry
and I like the Bible.

But, other than that, bleah!

So my daughter-in-law, Shannon,
hoping to retrieve me
from the land of poetry illiterates,
loaned me her book of Billy Collins poems.

"If you don't like these,"
she suggested darkly,
"there is no hope for you."

So I read Collins' poems,
or is it the poems of Collins?
Well, no matter, I read them.

And what did I find?
Not poetry,
but philosophic prose broken
into stacked-up part lines.

If this is really poetry,
then perhaps I do like it.

Flock, for instance,
on page 35,
is pretty good.

"Oh," you say,
"you just like that one
because it's so short."

Well, I admit it is short,
but I didn't like it
just for that.

I like it because
the last three lines
tickled me.

I also liked You, Reader
and it's kind of long
for a Collins poem.

Although I don't begrudge
Collins first including
rain-soaked windows,
ivy wallpaper,
and the goldfish circling in its bowl
into his poem.

After all, he's supposed to be the poet.

Then there's The Lanyard.
It is sweet, and I know
mothers are like that,
so it rang true.

And I like The Student
which called to my mind
through the vortex of time
cicada singing in the trees

above the velvety lawn
in the yard of the house
we rented in Maryland
long years ago.

So thank you, Shannon;
you have succeeded.

I like more poetry now
(if Collins really writes poetry)
than I did before.

So what is there left to say?
Oh yes, see,
some brown hens are standing in the rain.

[Bill on GR Sabbatical · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed my day with Billy Collins and the bear on the book cover.

You probably should know that I don't read a lot of poetry, although I dip a toe in now and then. When I'm in the mood, I find a collection that I hope will engage me on some level and this one did.

There are comfortable poems. It's Monday morning of the second week of our coronavirus self isolation as I write this, and it was pleasant to read in Monday that:

The birds are in their trees,
the toast is in the toaster,
and the poets are at their windows.

There are uncomfortable poems, like The Revenant, which begins:

I am the dog you put to sleep,
as you like to call the needle of oblivion,
come back to tell you this simple thing:
I never liked you-not one bit.

And there are a few poems about poetry, including, you know, the title poem:

the trouble with poetry is
that it encourages the writing of more poetry.

OK by me. I can't believe there's too much poetry in the world.
The Trouble With Poetry - And Other Poems

[Ken · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is popular to state that Billy Collins, the People's Poet (hmn, I wonder if he has a Court?), is in decline these days. What do I know, this is only the second collection of his I have read, though I have read plenty of his work via the Internet (the People's Poetry Journal, if you will).

Turns out, this collection is almost a teenager--12 years old, copyright in 2005. Meaning? If the wheels were getting wobbly, it started much sooner than the "it is popular to state" folks admit. There's a Billy Collins style, surely. Casual. Approachable. Avuncular. Though broken into tercets or quatrains, his lines are often leggy as Rockettes, commas and dashes along the way but a long ways to a period. But no one will come out of his poems confused, which is why he is so appreciated, I think. Especially among the many who believe poetry is too obscure for its own good.

One of my favorite poems in the collection, for example, is of humble origins. It comes from the common experience of summer camp. It is called...

"The Lanyard" (Billy Collins)

The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.
No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.
I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that's what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.
She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light
and taught me to walk and swim,
and I , in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.
Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth
that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

And then there are poems that, for me, fall a bit flat, especially the endings which are so crucial to the poem. One example is this one...

"Class Picture, 1954" (Billy Collins)

I am the third one
from the left in the third row.


The girl I have been in love with
since the 5th grade is just behind me
to the right, the one with the bangs.


The boy who pushes me down
in the playground
is the last one on the left in the top row.

And my friend Paul is the second one
in the second row, the one
with his collar sticking out, next to the teacher.

But that's not all—
if you look carefully you can see
our house in the background

with its porch and its brick chimney
and up in the clouds
you can see the faces of my parents,

and over there, off to the side,
Superman is balancing
a green car over his head with one hand.

Of course, you may see merit in the class picture as much as or more than in the lanyard. Poetry is a personal thing, notorious for its subjectivity if you are a reader. If you like it, heck with the vowel and buy a star or two from Vanna White, then go get the book.

[H (trying to keep up with GR friends) Balikov · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is more than one person in my family who enjoys the wit that Billy Collins offers in his poetry. We have read many of his poems and often shared our thoughts about them. We have given each other his books as gifts.
Yes, many have noted (and approved of) his “playfulness with words.” This selection of poems is a bit more focused on the effort to creat poetry and the consequences to the poet. If there is one poem that captures a lot of this it may be Monday.


Monday

The birds are in their trees,
the toast is in the toaster,
and the poets are at their windows.

They are at their windows
in every section of the tangerine of earth—
the Chinese poets looking up at the moon,
the American poets gazing out
at the pink and blue ribbons of sunrise.

The clerks are at their desks,
the miners are down in their mines,
and the poets are looking out their windows
maybe with a cigarette, a cup of tea,
and maybe a flannel shirt or bathrobe is involved.

The proofreaders are playing the ping-pong
game of proofreading,
glancing back and forth from page to page,
the chefs are dicing celery and potatoes,
and the poets are at their windows
because it is their job for which
they are paid nothing every Friday afternoon.

Which window it hardly seems to matter
though many have a favorite,
for there is always something to see—
a bird grasping a thin branch,
the headlights of a taxi rounding a corner,
those two boys in wool caps angling across the street.

The fishermen bob in their boats,
the linemen climb their round poles,
the barbers wait by their mirrors and chairs,
and the poets continue to stare
at the cracked birdbath or a limb knocked down by the wind.

By now, it should go without saying
that what the oven is to the baker
and the berry-stained blouse to the dry cleaner,
so the window is to the poet.

Just think—
before the invention of the window,
the poets would have had to put on a jacket
and a winter hat to go outside
or remain indoors with only a wall to stare at.

And when I say a wall,
I do not mean a wall with striped wallpaper
and a sketch of a cow in a frame.

I mean a cold wall of fieldstones,
the wall of the medieval sonnet,
the original woman’s heart of stone,
the stone caught in the throat of her poet-lover."

Selecting this poem was not intended to suggest that this is a more dour Billy Collins than in his other collections. But I think it shows that his wit and his “playfulness” are not a process without effort.

[Ashley Marilynne Wong · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wish I could write like him! This poetry collection is just…is just…well…sublime! I want to produce something as funny, witty and entertaining!

[Bjorn Sorensen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Collins excels because he's readable and reassuring, yet often surprising. I read this right before I go to bed - it's that kind of book. Accessibility with the option to think about it as much as I have the energy for. I wish he would write in different styles - everything starts out with something like "I was sitting in my living room peeling a pear and staring out the window...". Everything in first person ultra-conversational. He can get a little too playful at times, but rarely is he smug. He's simply comfortable with who he is and because of that takes very imaginative leaps within his writing. The book is also notable for having the Collins classics "The Lanyard", "Building with Its Face Blown Off" and the title poem.

I'm reading it again right now, in fact. Sweet dreams.

[Clif Brittain · Rating 4 out of 5]

The trouble with poetry is that I usually don't get it. Chickens in the rain and all that. I have even less of an ear for it. But actually, I do like the chickens in the rain stuff, as long as it is not too long.

I like Collins for three reasons:

His tastes are like mine. He likes the same things I do, dislikes the same things. So when he writes about the joy of hearing the Swan Silvertones, I have been there and enjoy that. He writes about some of life's perfect little moments that I've forgotten, but he has been prescient enough to recognize and record. These are his moments, but I can enjoy them as if they were mine.

I like his images, e.g. "The silence of the falling vase before it strikes the floor..." That moment when the attention is so focused that all other sights, sounds, smells disappear is captured here and in many other places. "...the intelligent little trinity of my fingers gripping the neck of the pencil / while the other two dangle below like the fleshy legs of a tiny swimmer." My hands have at least as much intelligence as my brain, but I would never think to identify them as "intelligent little trinity."

He captures the emotions so well. "Lanyard" is my favorite poem of his. I heard him read it at my daughter's graduation, and I wasn't the only one crying. I read it to my Mom on her birthday and on Mother's Day. She cries too.

For you dog lovers, there is plenty for you. See Care and Feeding.

Collins' poetry is perfect for those moments when you don't have time to read for more than a few minutes. This is the perfect book to have on my Kindle. I would never lug around a book for those few minutes spent waiting here or there, but the Kindle is perfect for that.

[Megan Baxter · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was the second book, along with Guy Gavriel Kay's River of Stars, that I bought myself with a birthday gift certificate from my lovely friend Nele. I have only read one other collection of Billy Collins poetry, but it struck me so much that I needed to own it. I mean, needed to own it, with a deep and abiding desire to have it always around so I could flip through the pages and find favourite poems whenever I wanted.

Note: The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here.

In the meantime, you can read the entire review at Smorgasbook

[Emma · Rating 5 out of 5]

This might be my favorite of his books. I haven't read all of them, but I have read most. It's the only one I can recall where he comes across, at times, as vulnerable or forlorn. He's always a master technician of the line, but also of this delicate, light-as-air tone. In this collection, there is sorrow, even a man contemplating his own mortality. That all really appealed to me. It takes him off the poetry pedestal and places him square in the ranks with the rest of us sincere-hearted fumblers.

[Emily Schoeffler · Rating 3 out of 5]

The poetry book with a bear on the cover.
I think the authors name starts with a C… Collins, maybe?

My monday companion
Sitting at the top of the 3 book stack,
twisted ever so slightly to the left.

I’ve looked at the bear and wondered what’s inside
My curiosity taking me away from the feeling in my chest that I can’t put words behind.

And today I followed the curiosity.
Followed it into the room.
Not just the one to the right at the end of the hall,
But to the library of poetry which otherwise would have remained closed.

88 pages seems so quick, but as Billy shares,
The trouble with poetry is that it makes you want to write more poetry.
So thank you, my friend the bear.

[Sara · Rating 1 out of 5]

After being disgusted by Ballistics, I didn't figure I'd ever pick up Billy again. But I found his poems multiple times in anthologies, and liked them. I was surprised to realize they were his, because they were so good. And so I found another book hoping I'd like him. I don't. Those poems I liked were earlier, much earlier, from the nineties. Everything I've found more recent is worse. So unless I find his very first book of poems, I won't seek out any more Billy.
I should note what I don't like. Mainly, these poems say "I sat" "I thought" "I said" and proceed to tell us exactly what he said, thought, and sat on. If an idea outside of his (mundane) life makes it in, that idea is killed by a last line like "and reached for the towel that was so far away" (paraphrased). I like some poets' poems of their lives. Billy just thinks his bath is the most important thing that never happened to me. And it isn't.
Also his beats, which I can't call rhythm, merge exactly with a dripping shower head. No flow, no rhythm, just plunkplunkplop. Awful.

[Alena · Rating 4 out of 5]

A gift from my son, this collection was a perfect accompaniment to the fiction and non-fiction I’ve been reading this month. Collins speaks right to me - uncomplicated and not fussy, but poignant and filled with heart. He’s just a treasure.

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The cover of this book is a whimsical painting of a bear, almost a cartoon rendering of a bear. It points to the playfulness beneath the cover. One thing so appealing about Billy Collins is that he gives us serious poetry which he seems to not take seriously at all. There's plenty of frolicsome exuberance here and in his poetry as a whole. But unstated in his style is the understanding that he chooses to look at ideas with an impish eye, and also that one may come away from his verse thinking his way of looking is the best way. Collins's poems are gentle vessels, but they spill the steel of a true vision to forge a new, stronger awareness of the world and how it works. And how we can use it to our own betterment. Collins sings what he sees and sings it beautifully. This is straightforward, without fuss, embroidery, or curlicues. Collins uses simple language arranged to paint the gleaming image or drive home the deep idea. He makes the commonplace incandescent. This is the first volume of Collins I've read in several years. I'm reminding myself now to not get too far away from this guy.

[C.A. · Rating 1 out of 5]

THE TROUBLE WITH POETRY IS BILLY COLLINS!
I'd rather drink battery acid!
WITH LEMON MIND YOU!
No sense drinking battery acid without lemon!
CAConrad
http://CAConrad.blogspot.com

[Kristina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am not a reader of poetry. And frankly, I am not usually a like-er of poetry (save a few that I have grown to love.) To me reading poetry was like eating a plate of beets--which makes me gag. However, Billy Collins' poetry is not beat level. He is definitely more of a donut that I was able to snag on a lucky morning.

I love his rhythm, I love that it doesn't rhyme but you still feel the ebbs band flows of his words in sync with each other. I marked several pages of this book: "Breathless", "The Lanyard", "The Order of the Day", "Constellations" and "The Introduction". While those were the ones that spoke to me specifically, I throughly enjoyed the whole book.

Enjoy the danish...it's delightful.

[Jon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Billy Collins is a very popular poet, mostly because his poems are clear and (a term he dislikes) accessible--in his introduction to a different book of poems, he remarks that a poem should at least have a clear starting place, otherwise it has nowhere to go; if it doesn't begin in lucidity it can't advance to the mysterious. I agree. There is a wonderful anthology of Bad Poetry titled The Stuffed Owl, which came out in 1930 and has been recently reprinted with a new introduction by Collins. He remarks there that Bad Poetry (laughably, embarrassingly bad) was mostly written in the 18th and 19th centuries as poets tried too hard to fit the required forms of meter and rhyme. The reaction to the required forms was Free Verse, which, he thinks, disguises badness and results in a great deal of OK poetry. I'm afraid that's where I'd have to put most of the poems in this collection. A few are quite funny, several raise interesting questions. But there is a lot of

I was only thinking
about the shakers of salt and pepper
that were standing side by side on a place mat.
I wondered if they had become friends
after all these years
or if they were still strangers to one another
like you and I
who manage to be known and unknown
to each other at the same time--
me at this table with a bowl of pears,
you leaning in a doorway somewhere
near some blue hydrangeas, reading this.

I'm currently reading a murder mystery which has this: "Clouds were running like tumbleweed across a sky of intense, saturated, heraldic azure. The tall, bare plane trees on the green swayed solemnly like folkies singing Kumbayah. All around, the residents--young, old and middling--were sleeping, getting up, planning their day, thinking about work, school, sex, shopping, football. Some were perhaps dying." I don't see much difference in lucidity, cadence, profundity, or vividness of description between the two. Maybe it's just me. There were a couple of very arresting poems in the Collins collection, but mostly they were pretty OK.

[Tawny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Favorite lines:

From "Carry"
I want to carry you
and for you to carry me
the way voices are said to carry over water.

"Flock"
It has been calculated that each copy of the
Gutenberg Bible required the skins of 300 sheep.

I can see them squeezed into the holding pen
behind the stone building
where the printing press is housed,
all of them squirming around
to find a little room
and looking so much alike
it would be nearly impossible
to count them,
and there is no telling
which one will carry the news
that the Lord is a shepherd,
one of the few things they already know.

[Lindsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't think Billy Collins is the absolute best poet, but he is hands down my personal favorite. I loved this collection, just as I always love his collections, and some of the highlights here were "Bereft," "The Introduction," "Flock," "You, Reader," and "The Drawing Class." "The Lanyard," which happens to be one of my all-time favorite poems, is also in this volume; I first heard Collins read it several years ago on "A Prairie Home Companion," and it totally cracked me up. He's just the greatest. (I'll stop gushing now.)

[Kay · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm someone who doesn't read poetry all that often because all the wrong poetry was stuffed down my throat during high school. I've been too lazy to bother finding more, until now.

This is the first time I've read Billy Collins' work, and I think it's beautiful. It's naked poetry - free from poetic device and pretense. This is poetry that speaks to the everyday man and doesn't attempt to be erudite. This will keep you thinking, but will leave you satisfied despite the wonder it instills in you.

Edit: grammar

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Collins has a way of capturing moments of wonder in verse that is graceful and lovely without calling attention to itself as difficult, the way so much poetry does. The moment can't be held; it passes through us, and these poems do also, but they leave me with the sensation of the writer living life well, living life alert to beauty and story in myriad ordinary moments.

[Cami · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked this poet!
It was a lot like reading a modern Robert Frost (and I think that is a great compliment).
I like that this collection seemed to highlight the creative process throughout.
Favorites:
Drawing Class
I Ask You
Special Glasses
The Lanyard (a must read for mothers who feel unappreciated)

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first I have read Billy Collins and I am glad to have come across him at this point. His verse is clear, concise and accessible. I don't know how appreciated he may be by younger readers, but he certainly appeals to my 40 something sensibility.

[Anna W. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read probably 3/4ths of this. I liked several of the poems and reallllly liked The Lanyard and The Revenant. Very hard hitting but in very different ways. I couldn't be more vague.

[Magdelanye · Rating 4 out of 5]

The birds are in their trees,
the toast is in the toaster,
and the poets are at their windows.
....
Which window it hardly seems to matter

from the poem Monday p7

Such merry insouciance characterizes most of the poems in this volume, connecting the mundane with the inspirational. BC seems cosy with the infinite, but I pegged him for a minor eccentric and was shocked to discover that he was poet laureate of the united States from 2001 to 2003. Either I have been living under a rock or there really is not much connecting American poets to Canadian reality.

History will never find a way to end. p47 from Boy Shooting at a Statue

[Ashtyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Of course I loved it. Please go read “Lanyard” if you want to laugh, and “The Introduction” if you also think they are too many mediocre books about how to write well. And here is the latter half of “The Trouble with Poetry,” because I loved it:

And along with that, the longing to steal,
to break into the poems of others
with a flashlight and a ski mask

And what an unmerry band of thieves we are,
cut-purses, common shoplifters
I thought to myself
as a cold wave swirled around my feet
and the lighthouse moved its megaphone over the sea,
which is an image I stole directly
from Lawrence Ferlinghetti—
to be perfectly honest for a moment—

the bicycling poet of San Francisco
whose little amusement park of a book
I carried in a side pocket of my uniform
up and down the treacherous halls of high school.

[Carmen Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

“But mostly poetry fills me
with the urge to write poetry …”

Billy Collins is one of the few poets who make me want to pick up a pen a write some of my own. His is the kind that I can read with out working my brain muscles so hard to decipher the meaning. 😅 it’s always a joy to pick up his work. They make me smile, even chuckle sometimes. My brain relaxes when I read his work. ✨

[Haley Petcher Bynum · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5

“The Lanyard” has been one of my favorite poems since high school.

[Janet · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absolutely delightful. This collection includes "The Lanyard", which is one of Collins' best-loved poems, quite deservedly. It is a wonderful example of his unique style - charming, funny, and powerful. I confess a particular fondness for "Breathless" and also got lots of laughs from "The Order of the Day" and the one about dogs writing poetry in heaven.

[Deb (Readerbuzz) Nance · Rating 4 out of 5]

It made my heart hurt just a little to see that black marker slash across the checkout barcode on this book at the library book sale---culled, in pristine condition. How could patrons at my county library have overlooked this wonderful book of Billy Collins' work?

I delighted in the re-reading of it, a book full of many of my favorites: "Traveling Alone," "The Peasant's Revolt," "Bereft," and, of course, the first Billy Collins poem I ever read, pointed out to me by my teenage son, "The Lanyard."

[Mark Jr. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not as funny as my other Collins collection. But still good.