Billy Collins: Porky Pig Poet

This weekend’s Wall Street Journal features an article by Billy Collins, the most popular poet in America and former Poet Laureate. Collins makes a few interesting observations about artistic influence: “the question of literary influence is a tricky one. For one thing, it offers the author the opportunity to duck it by substituting for his actual influence certain names the dropping of which is designed to impress.” He notes that writers tend to only name artists from their own genre, when “the truth is that influence enters us from all sides. . . . A short-story writer may have been influenced by 18th-century Dutch painting as much as anything else—or by his mother’s cooking.” Unfortunately, Collins spends the rest of the article describing how Warner Brothers cartoons influenced his own work:

Characters could jump dimensions, leaping around in time and space, their sudden exits marked by a rifle-shot sound effect. Anticipating the tricks of metafiction, these creatures could hop right out of the world of the cartoon and into our world, often Hollywood itself to consort with caricatures of Eddie Cantor and Marilyn Monroe. Or Bugs would do the impossible by jumping out of the frame and landing on the drawing board of the cartoonist who was at work creating him. This freedom to transcend the laws of basic physics, to hop around in time and space, and to skip from one dimension to another has long been a crucial aspect of imaginative poetry. Robert Bly developed a poetics based on the notion of psychic “leaping,” where the genius of a poem is measured by its ability to leap without warning from the conscious to the unconscious and back again.

We can agree with the broader statement about imaginative leaping (Keats’s “To a Nightingale” is another great example, as is Ashbery’s “The Instruction Manual”), but the connection between cartoons and great art is more than a little labored.

There’s nothing pretentious about Collins, which we admire. But his article will not comfort anyone who believes that there isn’t enough substance to his poetry. Case in point:
the poetry (first published in 1977) that accompanies the article. For example:

Porky
Happy only
when he is gardening alone
far from conversation
and the terrible stammering
far from Petunia, nag and tease
just resting on a hoe
unembarrassed
as he contemplates
the blue background of his flat world --
a Zen pig.

We do not count ourselves among those who think that pop culture can inspire only bad poetry, but this has all the heft of a kindergarten haiku, and is neither interesting nor (worst of all!) even funny. We prefer this one by William Trowbridge, which a) surprises the reader and b) makes connections between the subject matter and the speaker’s life.

Baer is Blogged

InsideCatholic has a profile about Dr. Baer. The piece covers Baer's nurturing of a Catholic literary scene, as well as his important work with formal poetry. (Best of all, it appears that its author is cut from our Mahwahvian cloth.) A blurb:

Like many other Catholic writers, Baer believes that faithful Catholics do not need to convey a specifically Catholic teaching through their art: "Their work can be simply entertaining; or it can be moral; or it can offer a specifically Catholic perspective. Catholic writers can do all sorts of things, as long as they consider whether it's pleasing to God."

That passage also wins the Southwell Award for "The Most Uses of the Word 'Catholic' in a Paragraph."

EW's 100 "Best Reads"

Entertainment Weekly has a list of the 100 best books of the past 25 years. Ross Douthat vents here. Like him, we're not happy that a Harry Potter comes in at #2. We're also amazed that of the four comic books on the list, two are in the top 15. A couple would be fine...and we really enjoyed The Watchmen when we read it in junior high, which is when you should read comic books (sorry, we're not calling them graphic novels). But let's not get carried away. It says a lot about the state of "things" that the list includes so many works written for adolescents, yet no poetry collections and (again, by our unofficial tally) only four collections of short stories (Munro, Moore, Danticat, and Carver.)

Nick Hornby & the Insular Novel

We’ve been enjoying Housekeeping vs. The Dirt, a collection of critical essays that Nick Hornby wrote for The Believer. In these essays, Hornby writes about the books he read, and lists the books he bought, each month. If you’ve read High Fidelity, About a Boy, A Long Way Down, or any of Hornby’s novels, you know that his voice is fun and welcoming. He also makes some sharp observations about literature. We don’t always agree with him, but since this site says nothing nasty ’bout nobody, we’ll focus on what we like.

Hornby is concerned that not only is the average Joe reading less and less, but novelists are making matters worse by writing too much about writers and book nerds—that, in short, “the world of books seems to be getting more bookish.” He names a few novels to make his case, focusing particularly on Ian McEwan’s Saturday, whose narrator is a successful neurosurgeon with a daughter and father-in-law who both won the prestigious Newdigate Poetry award while students at Oxford. Hornby writes:

There are, I think, two reasons to be a little queasy about this trend. The first is, quite simply, that it excludes readers; the woman in the barber’s is not the only one who wouldn't want to read about the Newdigate Prize. And yes, maybe great art shouldn’t be afraid of being elitist, but there’s plenty of great art that isn’t, and I don’t want bright people who don’t happen to have a degree in literature to give up on the contemporary novel; I want them to believe there’s a point to it all, that fiction has a purpose visible to anyone capable of reading a book intended for grown-ups. Taken as a group, these novels seem to raise the white flag: we give in! We don't know what those people out there want! Pull up the drawbridges!

And the second cause for concern is that writing exclusively about highly articulate people….Well, isn’t it cheating a little? McEwan’s hero, Henry Perowne, the father and son-in-law of the poets, is a neurosurgeon, and his wife is a corporate lawyer; like many highly educated middle-class [they seemed more like upper-class to me] people, they have access to and a facility with language, a facility that enables them to speak very directly and lucidly about their lives…, and there’s a sense in which McEwan is wasted on them. They don’t need his help. What I’ve always loved about fiction is its ability to be smart about people who aren’t themselves smart, or at least don’t necessarily have the resources to describe their own emotional states. That was the way Twain was smart, and Dickens; and that is surely one of the reasons why Roddy Doyle is adored by all sorts of people, many of whom are infrequent book-buyers. It seems to me a more remarkable gift than the ability to let extremely literate people say extremely literate things.

Right on—and this isn’t much different from what Tom Wolfe writes in “My Three Stooges.” Not only does this trend suggest a lack of imagination, it also flatters the writer. If we remember right, McEwan’s novel [SPOILER ALERT] ends with Robert Browning crashing through the skylight to pummel an armed intruder who threatens the hero’s family. Ah, poets—the unacknowledged superheroes of the world!

Let’s face it: reciting “Dover Beach” isn’t going to dissuade anyone from kicking your ass. (Playing Eric Johnson’s “Cliffs of Dover” might.) Of course literature is important, but the more novelists and poets write about novelists, poets, and the people who love them—that is, people like themselves—the less average people will read quality literature. Writers should not dumb-down their craft, but must recognize that they may not be quite as interesting as they think.

Fighting for Pfleger

Readers of this site know that one of its main purposes is to explore ways to integrate faith and art. We therefore rarely delve into political controversy, but we think it's important to make an exception in the case of Father Michael Pfleger. Though he has apologized for his recent sermon, in which he ridiculed Hillary Clinton, we praise and applaud him for using the art of stand-up comedy to spread the Catholic gospel of social justice. In case you haven't seen it:



His impersonation of Hillary Clinton— "I'm white! I'm entitled! There's a black man stealing my show!!!"—is stand-up gold, as the crowd's reaction shows. It is very possible that he looked to Chris Rock for his inspiration:



(Sorry, but that was just about the only clean clip we could find.) Father Pfleger is breaking ground for Catholic clergy, and his brother priests would do well to follow his example by impersonating celebrities and political figures during their sermons.

They may also consider incorporating some meditations into the different driving styles of black and white people, like this one from The Simpsons:

Comedian: Yo, check this out: black guys drive a car like this.
[Leans back, as though his elbow were on the windowsill]
Do, do, ch. Do-be-do, do-be-do-be-do.
Yeah, but white guys, see, they drive a car like this.
[Hunches forward, talks nasally]
Dee-da-dee, a-dee-da-dee-da-dee-da-dee.
[Audience howls with laughter]
Homer: Ah ha ha, it's true, it's true! We're so lame!

Stay strong, Father Pfleger—and don't forget: women be shoppin'!