Poetry’s Everyday Voice: Billy Collins’s “Picnic, Lightning”

The relatively raging success that Billy Collins has enjoyed as a poet has not come without detractors who decry his free-flowing use of straightforward language and thematic material. This approach makes his poems generally easy to comprehend and, not unimportantly for him and his publishers, huge sellers—at least in comparison to most poetry that has always been the poor stepchild of the literary world.

The now 83-year-old Collins has published 18 volumes of poetry since his 1977 debut volume. The first half-dozen or so went the usual small or university press route that sold a few hundred, maybe up to a (blockbuster!) few thousand volumes and netted him six cents in his bank account. (O.K., it may have been $600, but you get the point…)

And then, a kind of literary/commercial magic happened. Various sparks of the agent-publisher-audience interplay combusted into a rare phenomenon in the poetry world: a poet who got rich by attracting a wide audience happy to buy his books and make his publisher some decent money in the bargain.

Wonders!

This elicited, among many such protests from critics, the following from a 2006 “Contemporary Poetry Review” discussion of his work sporting the headline, “Wages of Fame: The Case of Billy Collins”:

“Collins tends to rest at the center of his own attention, and while he has some capacity to ‘aw shucks’ his readers half to death, he is incapable of uttering a truly discouraging word. His poems are comforting and reassuringly predictable. Collins may be best understood as a type of pop artist (pop as in American Idol, pleasing the greatest numbers with spangly but ultimately tame renditions of the same song). Collins knows his limitations and is at ease with them. If he took chances, or attempted more advanced techniques, he would lose his audience. He is the Kenny G. of poetry.”

Ouch on that Kenny G. reference, which I’d rate as an inaccurate and cruel cut. (That Kenny G. hair alone—’nuff said! And if Collins resembles any musician in style and sensibility, it would be John Prine, nobody’s idea of a simpleton.)

More ambiguous was this excerpt from a 2001 article in the “New York Times” headlined, “The Selling of Billy Collins”:

“‘Sailing Alone Around the Room,’ pushed by Random House, has gone to a fifth printing and now has 55,000 copies in print after an initial first printing of 30,000, making it a poetry megaseller. Mr. Collins has been extensively reviewed and interviewed, and he receives thousands of dollars to give readings. Astonishingly enough, the business of books has intersected with the making of literature and both have prospered. Mr. Collins, and poetry, are being sold, and nobody seems to mind.”

Actually, plenty of people (though not all) from the academic poetry establishment have minded. But they have been outvoted by the purchasing decisions and attention Collins fans have bestowed on him for a very long time now.

To be sure, there’s nothing wrong with poetry addressing more complex themes, or using the overflowing basket of technical tools at its disposal (couplets, tercets, quatrains, haikus, sonnets, vilanelles; there are at least 150 more). Collins’s free verse literally frees him to pursue wherever he goes, from the playful to the profound, without any technical constraints.

But more importantly, poetry should mean something to more than just a few cloistered academics fussing over arcane references and poetic forms from obscure poets publishing in obscure journals that all but a handful of the earth’s 8 billion inhabitants summarily ignore. Meaning the idea that “the business of books has intersected with the making of literature and both have prospered” is cause for robust celebration, not thinly veiled questioning of the poetry’s worth.

So roll out the champagne, please—and don’t wander too far with that bottle.

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The poem up for discussion here bears its own uncanny relationship, unintentionally so by me, to the “lightning” that catapulted Collins’s poetry career into his “megaseller” status and a bushel of fellowships and awards. That career’s crowning honors, besides his now hundreds of thousands of book sales, are surely capped by his service as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001-2003, followed by New York State Poet Laureate from 2004-2006.

“Picnic, Lightning” is the title poem in his 1998 volume published by University of Pittsburgh Press, which went on to sell an astonishing 50,000 copies within three years of its initial printing. The volume on my nightstand is from the fourth printing; it is currently in its tenth.

In a charming bit of literary homage, Collins steals the poem’s title from the second chapter of Vladimir Nabokov’s notorious 1955 novel, “Lolita.” Excerpted under the title at the top of the page is what strikes me as one of the all-time great sentences in American literature: “My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three.”

The deadpan economy of those parenthetical words is every writer’s wet dream: to pack an entire catastrophic, life-changing event into a mere two words, joined by a comma that leaves both black humor and horror in its wake. This compressing-of-a-world is what poets try to do as a general rule, and Collins honors the poeticism of Nabokov the novelist in running with that glorious sentence and grafting another 40 lines onto it that sing in their own way.

He starts with an image related to being struck by lightning: “It is possible to be struck by a meteor/or a single engine plane/while sitting in a chair at home.”

This everyday, even banal image of “sitting in a chair at home” is pure Collins, whom the author of the “Times” article above half-heartedly praises by acknowledging, “His poems, which delve into traditionally unpoetic subjects like pesky neighborhood dogs and the pleasures of a good meal, are deceptively simple.”

True enough, and as a bonus, they are also overtly lighthearted on occasion, as in the year 2000 volume that followed hot on the heels of “Picnic, Lightning.” In the twinkle-eyed title poem, “Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes,” he writes: “The complexity of women’s undergarments/in nineteenth-century America/is not to be waved off.”

Anyway: enough about Collins for now. Let’s get to his poem before returning for some concluding appreciation.

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             PICNIC, LIGHTNING

It is possible to be struck by a meteor
or a single-engine plane
while reading in a chair at home.
safes drop from rooftops
and flatten the odd pedestrian
mostly within the panels of the comics,
but still, we know it is possible,
as well as the flash of summer lightning,
the thermos toppling over,
spilling out on the grass.

And we know the message
can be delivered from within,
The heart, no valentine,
decides to quit after lunch,
the power shut off like a switch,
or a tiny dark ship is unmoored
into the flow of the body’s rivers,
the brain is a monastery,
defenseless on the shore.

This is what I think about
when I shovel compost
into a wheelbarrow,
and when I fill the long flower boxes,
then press into rows
the limp roots of red impatiens—
the instant hand of Death
always ready to burst forth
from the sleeve of his voluminous cloak.

Then the soil is full of marvels,
bits of leaf like flakes off a fresco,
red-brown pine needles, a beetle quick
to burrow back under the loam.
Then the wheelbarrow is a wilder blue,
the clouds a brighter white,

and all I hear is the rasp of the steel edge
against a round stone,
the small plants singing
with lifted faces, and the click
of the sundial
as one hour sweeps into the next.

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The poem is roughly divided into two sections: the dark hovering cloud of death with the deftly described “sleeve of his voluminous cloak” occupying the first, and then the “soil full of marvels” kicking off the second section.

The halves are joined by the narrator’s musing that “This is what I think about/when I shovel compost.” Those thoughts focus on the naked fact of death at any time, maybe coming from the sky, or maybe just “after lunch,” when “the heart, no valentine” (love that phrase!) “decides to quit…the power shut off like a switch.”

Yet the subject of death, as it is always capable of to a receptive heart, also turns wheelbarrows “a wilder blue/the clouds a brighter white.”

What the whole tableaux begets is a stirring image collection of a man contemplating finitude while shoveling compost into a wild blue wheelbarrow, bright white clouds above, “small plants singing/with lifted faces,” the dirt-become-compost begetting yet more life, bright blue and singing, as “one hour sweeps into the next.”

This is time, the great leveler, having its way as the whole world of nature, which very much includes this man standing by his wheelbarrow and standing in for all humanity, sings along, in perfect, attentive harmony.

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Deep appreciation to the photographers! Unless otherwise stated, some rights reserved under Creative Commons licensing.

Elizabeth Haslam, whose photos (except for the books) grace the rotating banner at top of page.
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Library books photo by Larry Rose, all rights reserved, contact: larry@rosefoto.com

Collins headshot by David Shankbone, New York City  https://www.flickr.com/photos/shankbone/

Lightning by AmyM Howard, Albuquerque, New Mexico  https://www.flickr.com/photos/amymhoward/

Wheelbarrow and sky by Andrew Hidas (and some fine and timely cooperation by the weather)  https://www.flickr.com/photos/andrewhidas/