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Silliman's Blog
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<p class='description'><span>A weblog focused on contemporary poetry and poetics.</span></p>
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Showing posts with label <b>Billy Collins</b>. <a href="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/">Show all posts</a>
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<div class='status-msg-hidden'>Showing posts with label <b>Billy Collins</b>. <a href="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/">Show all posts</a></div>
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          <div class="date-outer">
        
<h2 class='date-header'><span>Thursday, December 26, 2002</span></h2>

          <div class="date-posts">
        
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<div class='post-body entry-content' id='post-body-86546353' itemprop='description articleBody'>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Bad writing isn&#8217;t always a
sign of a poet&#8217;s incompetence. Sometimes it seems even to be intentional. Let&#8217;s
read a poem, something from the new issue of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Washington Square, </i>&#8220;Class Picture, 1954&#8221;:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I
am the third one<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">from
the left in the third row.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The
girl I have been in love with<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">since
the 5<sup>th</sup> grade is just behind me<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">to
the right, the one with the bangs.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The
boy who pushes me down<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">in
the playground sometimes<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">is
in the top row, the last one on the left.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">And
my friend Paul is the second one<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">in
the second row, the one<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">with
his collar sticking out, next to the teacher.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">But
that&#8217;s not all&#8212;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">if
you look closely you can see<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">our
house in the background<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">with
its porch and its brick chimney<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">and
up in the clouds<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">you
can see the faces of my parents,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">and
over there, off to the side,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Superman
is balancing<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">a
green car over his head with one hand.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The first thing we notice is
that this poem functions very much like a Hollywood movie or TV sitcom &#8211; each
stanza will carry one &amp; only one idea. If there is a single defining
feature that characterizes the barrenness of American commercial media, that&#8217;s
it! The complexity &amp; nuances even of a Howard Stern talk show are
consciously &amp; deliberately drained away. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">There have been genres of
poetry that focused on a single meaning for a short unit of verse &#8211; imagism
&amp; some aspects of Objectivism come to mind &#8211; but neither composes with the
kind of loose, prosoid, tho very clean, style evidenced here. It&#8217;s precisely
this cleanliness of the writing that makes me think that this poetry is
intentional. Yet the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">unit = idea</i>
phenomenon for these older modes tends very much toward the line &amp;/or
phrase. Thus, clean as it is, this is a rather bloated concept of &#8220;directness&#8221;
(or however the poet thinks of it). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The reader is very much
invited here to identify the narrator of the text with the poet, which tends to
set off (at least for this reader) some calculations as to what grade of
students is figured in the text. The second stanza lets us know that it is past
the fifth grade, while the third tells us that it is still in the playground
bully-victim range &#8211; seventh grade would be pushing it. Yet the distancing
effect of &#8220;since the 5<sup>th</sup> grade&#8221; makes sixth grade improbable, at
least if we presume the competence of the writer. Placing it at seventh or
above, though, suggests that the narrator is a particular type of pathetic figure,
sort of a self-actualizing victim &amp; a general bully magnet. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">It&#8217;s a conundrum &#8211; either
the poet is inept or the narrator is intended to seem a particular type of
unattractive human being &#8211; but as quickly as this enters the frame, it&#8217;s passed
by. Paul of the fourth stanza enters &amp; appears to have no other function
than to spread the focus of the narrating gaze beyond the simple dramas of
puppy-love &amp; school ground terror. Neither Paul nor his teacher ever <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">do </i>anything, in this stanza or
elsewhere.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The &#8220;But&#8221; at the head of the
fifth stanza now announces the drama of the poem, as though the first four
strophes were no more than scene setting. There are other things visible in
this photograph &#8211; the narrator&#8217;s home, the site of who knows how many psychic dramas.
The first line of the sixth stanza keeps us very much grounded in the physical
realm of the photograph, while the second line performs a double function &#8211; the
closest moment in the entire poem to complexity. It appears, at one level, to
describe the physical world, yet is revealed in the next line as the transition
to a cloying sentimental cliché in a bizarrely American variation of magic
realism. The last line of this stanza is so atrocious that it virtually cries
out for Jeff Koons to come &amp; give us a sculpture of the image in porcelain.
Or marshmallow. Or something.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">What if the atrociousness of
the line is intentional? What if that&#8217;s the point of the poem in some weird
fashion? It&#8217;s almost like one of those old Hollywood flicks that tells a moral tale
about how violence is bad by giving us as much blood &amp; gore as it
conceivably can. If this is the case, then I don&#8217;t have a problem with the
poet&#8217;s competence, but with the poet&#8217;s ethics. Or lack thereof.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The seventh stanza suggests
that this might be the case, distancing itself from the almost horrific
sentimentalism of the sixth with this image &#8220;over there, off to the side.&#8221; It&#8217;s
Superman! Literally. Rescuing us from having to take this image of the
sanctified (&amp; by implication dead) parents of the sixth stanza too directly
&#8211; as if to acknowledge that the poem is bypassing whatever real emotions it
might want to call into play. Thus, the most fascinating word in this literary
auto wreck is the adjective &#8220;green&#8221; that starts off the final line. Its specificity
argues for a return to the real while at the same moment placing the image
entirely into a comic book landscape.* The entire stanza is really an escape
from the possibility of grief suggested by the placement of the parents faces
into the clouds. It&#8217;s as though the poem wants to point to the emotion, but
doesn&#8217;t want to &#8220;own&#8221; it. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">A different kind of reader
might suggest a correlation between the bullied presence of the pathetic figure
in the early stanzas &amp; a narrator unable to acknowledge emotion later in
the text, but this would be the critical equivalent of putting a bow tie on a
pig. What is more telling is that it is apparent that this poem is not
incompetent, or is incompetent only insofar as it tells us some very
unattractive things about the author that he may not have intended to give
away. The poet, by the way, is Billy Collins, whose name appears at the head of
the list of contributing &#8220;heavies&#8221; on the issue&#8217;s peach-colored cover, right
above Rick Moody and Amy Gerstler.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">This is the kind of poetry
that often makes post-avant poets livid with fury that anyone capable of
signing their own name would take it seriously, as if there were a conspiracy
to offer awards, trade publication and recognition only to the most vile of
human instincts. But just as there are human beings who see in George W. Bush a
plain-speaking compassionate man who had demonstrated great inner strength
confronting the terrors of the world, there is an audience for this kind of
literature as well, pathological though it may be. That such pathologies are so
prevalent as to be institutionalized in our society &#8211; institutionalized in the
political, rather than clinical, sense &#8211; is one of the more lurid phenomena
about America in its Late &#8211; but never late enough &#8211; Capitalist phase. This
poem, if it is read 500 years from now, will be a message to the future that
our century lived in the dark ages. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Putting Collins&#8217; name first
on the cover only draws attention to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Washington
Square&#8217;s</i> embarrassment in including this work at all. College literary
magazines tend to fall into one of two categories. The first contains all those
journals that primarily exist to print student writing, sometimes
contextualized by inclusions of faculty or visiting writers &#8211; this is sometimes
done well (as U.C. Berkeley&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Occident</i>
did occasionally), but more often simply presents work by writers who will
never appear in print again &amp; go onto other endeavors in their lives soon
enough. The second category of college literary journal focuses on &#8220;name&#8221;
writers &#8211; I&#8217;ve appeared in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Washington
Square</i> I must admit &#8211; and are really intended as training in editorial
skills for the student staff. These journals also are sometimes done well (as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Chicago Review</i> has done at different
points in its history) but more often reveal &#8211; as here &#8211; that the next
generation of New<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>York trade editors is
apt to be every bit as wretched as the one we have now. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">* The
George Reeves television series Superman did not begin filming in color until
the 1955 season, a year after the date posed in the poem&#8217;s title. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">MEMOIRS &amp; COLLABORATIONS</span><br /><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Leningrad-American-Writers-Soviet-Union/dp/1562790056">Leningrad</a><br /><a href="http://www.thegrandpiano.org/">The Grand Piano</a><br /><a href="https://www.saltpublishing.com/products/under-albany-9781844710515">Under Albany</a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">CRITICISM</span><br /><a href="http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/0937804207/the-new-sentence.aspx">The New Sentence</a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">ANTHOLOGY</span><br /><a href="https://secure.touchnet.com/C22921_ustores/web/classic/product_detail.jsp?PRODUCTID=327&SINGLESTORE=true">In The American Tree</a><br /><br /><br /><br />
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<br /><img alt="" src="file%3A///Users/Lynn/Desktop/silliman2a.jpg" / /><img alt="" src="file%3A///Users/Lynn/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/moz-screenshot.png" / /><span style="color: #990000; font-weight: bold;">RON SILLIMAN</span> has written and edited 40 books, and had his poetry and criticism translated into 16 languages. Silliman was a 2012 Kelly Writers House Fellow, the 2010 recipient of the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a 2003 Literary Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2002 Fellow of the Pennsylvania Arts Council, and a 1998 Pew Fellow in the Arts. Silliman has a plaque in the walk dedicated to poetry in his home town of Berkeley and a sculpture in the Transit Center of Bury, Lancaster, a part of the Irwell Sculpture Trail. He lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />(c) 2002-2019 by Ron Silliman.
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