March 22:
Billy Collins was born on this day in 1941. Collins has published or edited
nine collections of reader-friendly poems over the last decade. When his The Trouble with Poetry (2005) appeared,
it received the usual praise, but some protested that the two-term Poet
Laureate might be accessible to a fault. One reviewer for the New York Times sprang into verse himself, asking Collins for "not a
good-natured wave / from writer to reader, / or a literary joke, or a mild
chuckle," but "to be drawn / high into the poem's cloud-filled air / and
allowed to fall / on rocks real enough to hurt."
If Collins "has
brought laughter back to a melancholy art," some of the laughs have come from
a joke he played a few years ago through his mock-promotion of the
"paradelle," a poetic form in the manner of the rondelle, villanelle,
and other metric convolutions. Here's Collins providing a pedigree and
definition for his invention, junked together from some wrecking-yard for
poetic forms:
The paradelle is one of
the more demanding French fixed forms, first appearing in the langue d'oc love poetry of the eleventh
century. It is a poem of four six-line stanzas in which the first and second
lines, as well as the third and fourth lines of the first three stanzas, must
be identical. The fifth and sixth lines, which traditionally resolve these
stanzas, must use all the words from the preceding lines and only those words.
Similarly, the final stanza must use every word from all the preceding stanzas
and only these words.
Many would-be paradelle-ists
took all this seriously, and the form has actually gained some legitimacy—one
recent collection published with an introduction by a bemused Collins.
In the title poem of The Trouble With Poetry, Collins pays
tribute to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who turns ninety-two this Thursday. Collins says
that "The trouble with poetry / is that it encourages the writing of more
poetry / ...And along with that, the longing to steal, / to break into the
poems of others /with a flashlight and a ski mask." He then steals from a
poem in Ferlinghetti's A Coney Island of
the Mind, which "I carried in a side pocket of my uniform / up and
down the treacherous halls of high school."
Daybook is contributed by Steve King, who teaches in the English Department of Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland. His literary daybook began as a radio series syndicated nationally in Canada. He can be found online at todayinliterature.com.
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