Billy Collins is nothing better than a mentally challenged version of William Carlos Williams.

Tho he is not a plagiarist, he managed to take everything good and decent about Williams’ style and strip those parts out. It is sad, really, that a poet could remove all interesting elements from his/her work, including the most important: the poet.

What happened to poets that actually attempted to COMMUNICATE with their generation? Does Collins really capture the essence of his generation? Is this how one accounts for his popularity? Or is it his “accessibility”? (Can you really compliment a poet for being accessible when he/she takes no chances?).

The best part is, Mr. Billy Collins, is that you can change. There is a world going on around you, and your work has managed to miss the really important parts. Do not try and impress us with the trivial because nothing is such, and attempting it in a poem is fruitless. When you write a poem you should not only learn something about yourself, but about the world, and your audience MUST recognize this in your work so they can learn something about you and your (their, our) respective world(s).

So Mr. Collins, I leave you with this:

When your audience abandons you (alive or dead), will you be able to say the poems you have written are completely, utterly, entirely, you?

-C

9:02am  2/16/09