Billy Collins Comes Up Short in Musical Tables

 

 

MUSICAL TABLES (2022)

By Billy Collins

Random House, 176 pages.

★★

 

 

Billy Collins is my favorite poet but his latest, Musical Tables, is a small disappointment. Small, because it’s a collection of around 125 short poems. Collins seldom writes long poems, but I’d have to place these efforts–many of which are just two or three lines long–in the same category as I put most short stories. That is, they left me wanting much more.

 

Musical Tables isn’t haiku, nor does it pay much attention to meter or stress; they are prose poems that seek completeness within a compact form. Collins tells us that he’s always admired poets who have expressed themselves that way. He offers as way of explanation this little chestnut from A. R. Ammons titled Their Sex Life: “One failure on/Top of another.” I admit that this is a zinger and so too are some of Collins’ efforts. Allow me to offer a sampling of the ones I liked and before making more comments about why I was disappointed.

 

3:00 am

 

Only my hand

is asleep,

but it’s a start.

 

Reflections on an Amish Childhood

 

I was a little square

in a round hat.

 

The Visit

 

The wind blew

open the front door.

and sat down

in my father’s chair.

 

Google Maps

 

my parents’ grave

is 1198 miles north of here.

 

17 hours and 23 minutes

from now,

I’ll make believe I’m there.

 

The English Professor

 

when I asked him

if he was in love,

 

he accused me

of anthropomorphizing him.

 

The Exception

 

Whoever said

there’s a poem

lurking in the darkness

of every pencil

was not thinking of this one.

 

Embedded in these and a dozen others is the cleverness and poignancy leavened with humor that makes me a Collins fan. He cites Gary Snyder, Kay Ryan, and others as inspirations for his efforts, plus his habit of flipping to the short poems when perusing poetry volumes. Collins calls such short works, “poetry’s way of squeezing large content into small spaces.”

 

I understand where he’s coming from and share his enthusiasm for reading short, random samples of a book as a way to determine whether or not to read more. For me, though, an entire collection of short poems adds up to too much. There are gems in Musical Tables, but I was left feeling a combination of meh! and ennui. I reiterate that Collins is not a writer of epic poetry; a really long Billy Collins poem is one that spills onto a second page and when it gets past three, one feels as if it should be the lead story of the arts section: Billy Collins Writes Long Poem: Literary World Stunned.

 

Nonetheless, the best Billy Collins poems are stories that leave you giggling or stab you in the gut. His greatest poems do both. Musical Tables seems more like idle thoughts, the likes of which I jot down in my own writing notebook. The difference between me and Collins is that he takes his one or two intriguing lines and surrounds them with more quality material that makes me think, “Oh, that’s why he was a poet laureate and I’m just a guy who occasionally composes a good hook.”

 

I was disappointed in Musical Tables because too much of it read like my notebook. The above samples are roughly half of the ones I enjoyed. Quick arithmetic will tell you that roughly 90 percent of the rest struck me not as squeezing big ideas into small spaces, but as small ideas in need of more context. Modernist architects are fond of the concept “less is more,” but I don’t think it’s always the most flattering way to fashion a building or composing a poem. 

 

Rob Weir