Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry

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Overview
Editorial Reviews
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Table of Contents
First Chapter

Overview

A dazzling new anthology of 180 contemporary poems, selected and introduced by America’s Poet Laureate, Billy Collins.

Inspired by Billy Collins’s poem-a-day program with the Library of Congress, Poetry 180 is the perfect anthology for readers who appreciate engaging, thoughtful poems that are an immediate pleasure.

A 180-degree turn implies a turning back—in this case, to poetry. A collection of 180 poems by the most exciting poets at work today, Poetry 180 represents the richness and diversity of the form, and is designed to beckon readers with a selection of poems that are impossible not to love at first glance. Open the anthology to any page and discover a new poem to cherish, or savor all the poems, one at a time, to feel the full measure of contemporary poetry’s vibrance and abundance.

With poems by Catherine Bowman, Lucille Clifton, Billy Collins, Dana Gioia, Edward Hirsch, Galway Kinnell, Kenneth Koch, Philip Levine, Thomas Lux, William Matthews, Frances Mayes, Paul Muldoon, Naomi Shihab Nye, Sharon Olds, Katha Pollitt, Mary Jo Salter, Charles Simic, David Wojahn, Paul Zimmer, and many more.

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Editorial Reviews

KLIATT

Perhaps the focus and quality of Poetry 180 is best summed up in poet laureate Billy Collins' only poem in this anthology. In reference to poetry as taught in high school, he concludes, "I want them to waterski / across the surface of a poem / waving at the author's name on the shore. / But all they want to do / is tie the poem to a chair with rope / and torture a confession out of it. / They begin beating it with a hose / to find out what it means." In fact, Poetry 180 consciously avoids those pieces that "had become a standard offering in textbooks and anthologies." Instead, Collins states, "The idea behind this ... collection ... was to assemble a generous selection of short, clear, contemporary poems which any listener could basically 'get' on first hearing—poems whose injection of pleasure is immediate." It is intended "to expose high school students to the new voices in contemporary poetry." Yet the appeal is simultaneous to teenagers and those well beyond high school. The authors are top notch, the scope of the work is universal, and the approaches are varied: humorous, sad, reflective, giddy, always honest and perceptive. Where was this book when I was struggling to teach Creative Writing: Contemporary Poetry to juniors and seniors in high school? Any such course today has to consider Poetry 180 as a textbook and every library needs a copy on its shelves. It is, in Collins' words, "a big bouquet of poems that I happen to like." I'm betting you will too. KLIATT Codes: SA*—Exceptional book, recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2003, Random House, 323p. index.,
— James Beschta

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Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780812968873
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Publication date: 3/25/2003
Pages: 352
Sales rank: 115,044
Product dimensions: 5.14 (w) x 7.97 (h) x 0.70 (d)

Meet the Author

Billy Collins

Enjoying a popularity unheard of for most poets, Billy Collins has had a remarkable late-life surge, aided by NPR exposure and his 2001 and 2002 appointments as the U.S. poet laureate. His style is engaging, conversational, funny, and surprising.

Biography

In 1985, the humorist Calvin Trillin suggested that Robert Penn Warren would never have been named Poet Laureate if he'd been known as plain Bob Warren. Trillin might be surprised at the 2002 appointment of Billy Collins -- whose laid-back name suits his open-collar-and-blue-jeans appearance, as well as his unpretentious writing style -- to a second term as U.S. Poet Laureate.

But then, Collins himself might be a little surprised. Like most poets, he toiled in obscurity for years, snowed under by rejections from small literary journals. As recently as 1997, he couldn't interest a commercial publisher in his fifth book of poems, Picnic, Lightning. But word of mouth and Collins' appearances on National Public Radio helped push sales of the book, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, far beyond the usual figures for a volume of poetry from a university press. A previous book was reissued, Random House signed him up for a three-book deal, and Collins was on his way to fame and comparative fortune.

Why is Collins so popular now? One term often applied to his work is "accessible," though he prefers the term "hospitable." "I think accessible just means that the reader can walk into the poem without difficulty," he explained to Elizabeth Farnsworth on the PBS NewsHour. Collins is also very funny -- and that, too, is inviting. For Collins, anything from the barking of a neighbor's dog to the egg-salad stain on a copy of The Catcher in the Rye can be a fit subject for a poem.

But Collins sees accessibility and humor as means to an end. The purpose of a poem, he believes, is to take the reader on an imaginative journey. "Poetry is my cheap means of transportation," he told a New York Times interviewer. "By the end of the poem the reader should be in a different place from where he started. I would like him to be slightly disoriented at the end, like I drove him outside of town at night and dropped him off in a cornfield."

Critics have sometimes charged that Collins' language is too prosaic, his middle-class milieu too smugly comfortable. But many of his contemporaries, including John Updike, Gerald Stern and Edward Hirsch, have admired his originality, wit and intelligence. As Richard Howard put it: "Mr. Collins is funny without being silly, moving without being silly, and brainy without being silly. If only he were silly, we should know how to 'place' him. But he is merely -- merely! -- funny, moving, brainy. That will have to do."

Good To Know

Collins grew up in Jackson Heights, Queens, where his electrician father sometimes brought home issues of Poetry magazine from an office on Wall Street. "He wanted me to go to Harvard Business School," Collins said in a Hope magazine interview. "If he had known the effect of those magazines, he probably would have burned them."

As Poet Laureate, Collins launched a well-received program called Poetry 180, which encourages high schools to read a contemporary poem together each day, preferably by having a student, teacher or staff member read the poem aloud.

Collins is a professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York. He lives in Somers, N.Y.

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1. Also Known As:
  
  William James Collins
2. Hometown:
  
  Somers, New York
1. Date of Birth:
  
  March 22, 1941
2. Place of Birth:
  
  New York, New York
1. Education:
  
  B.A., Holy Cross College, 1963; Ph.D. in Romantic poetry, University of California at Riverside, 1971

Read an Excerpt

poetry 180: AN INTRODUCTION

A FEW YEARS AGO I FOUND MYSELF ON A CIRCUIT OF readings, traveling around the Midwest from podium to podium. One stop was at an enormous high school south of Chicago. Despite its daunting size—picture a row of lockers receding into infinity—the school holds a “Poetry Day” every year featuring an exuberant range of activities, including poems set to music by students and performed by the high school chorus and a ninety-piece orchestra. As featured poet that year, I found myself caught up in the high spirits of the day, which seemed to be coming directly from the students themselves, rather than being faculty-imposed. After reading to a crowded auditorium, I was approached by a student who presented me with a copy of the school newspaper containing an article she had written about poetry. In that article, I found a memorable summary of the discomfort so many people seem to experience with poetry. “Whenever I read a modern poem,” this teenage girl wrote, “it’s like my brother has his foot on the back of my neck in the swimming pool.”

Poetry 180 was inspired by the desire to remove poetry far from such scenes of torment. The idea behind this printed collection, which is a version of the Library of Congress “180” website, was to assemble a generous selection of short, clear, contemporary poems which any listener could basically “get” on first hearing—poems whose injection of pleasure is immediate. The original website, which continues to be up and running strong, www.loc.gov/poetry/180, is part of a national initiative I developed shortly after being appointed United States Poet Laureate in 2001. The program is called “Poetry 180: A Poem a Day for American High Schools.” In creating it, I had hoped the program would suggest to young people the notion that poetry can be a part of everyday life as well as a subject to be studied in the classroom. On the website, I ask high school teachers and administrators to adopt the program by having a new poem read every day—one for each of the roughly 180 days of the school year—as part of the public announcements. Whether the poems are read over a PA system or at the end of a school assembly, students can hear poetry on a daily basis without feeling any pressure to respond. I wanted teachers to refrain from commenting on the poems or asking students “literary” questions about them. No discussion, no explication, no quiz, no midterm, no seven-page paper—just listen to a poem every morning and off you go to your first class.

I might not have come up with such an ambitious national plan—or any plan at all—were it not for the energetic efforts made by previous laureates to spread the word of poetry far and wide. Prior to the democratizing efforts of Joseph Brodsky, who envisioned poetry being handed out at supermarkets and planted in the bed tables of motel rooms next to the Gideon Bible, the post of poet laureate was centered at the Library of Congress in Washington, specifically in a spacious suite of rooms at the top of the magnificent Jefferson Building, complete with a balcony and, as one visi- tor put it, a “CNN view” of the Capitol. In those days, the position was called “Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress”—admittedly, a mouthful with a businesslike sound. It was the habit of many Consultants to relocate to Washington, go to the office a few days a week, and—I can only imagine—wait for the phone to ring. You never knew when some senator would be curious to know who wrote “Two Tramps in Mud Time.” According to Mary Jarrell’s memoir, she and Randall took advantage of his tenure in the nation’s capital by enjoying cultural offerings such as the Budapest string quartet. Maxine Kumin invited Washington-area schoolchildren to the Poetry Room. Robert Penn Warren wisely devoted one of his terms to the writing of All the King’s Men. But by the time I took office, the laureateship had evolved into a seat from which resourceful plans for the national dissemination of poetry were being launched. And so Poetry 180 became my contribution.

High school is the focus of my program because all too often it is the place where poetry goes to die. While poetry offers us the possibility of modulating our pace, adolescence is commonly driven by the wish to accelerate, to get from zero to sixty in a heartbeat or in a speed-shop Honda. And de- spite the sometimes heroic efforts of dedicated teachers, many adolescents find poetry—to use their term of ultimate condemnation—boring. What some students experience when they are made to confront a poem might be summed up in a frustrating syllogism:

I understand English.

This poem is written in English.

I have no idea what this poem is saying.

What is “the misfit witch blocks my quantum path?” a reader might well ask. What’s up with “a waveform leaps in my belly”? What’s a reader to do in the face of such unyielding obtuseness?

But let us hear from the other side of the room. If there is no room in poetry for difficulty, where is difficulty to go? Just as poetry provides a home for ambiguity, it offers difficulty a place to be dramatized if not solved. “Even in our games,” asserts John Ciardi, “we demand difficulty.” Which explains why hockey is played on ice and why chess involves more than two warring queens chasing each other around the board. During the heyday of Pound, Eliot, Stevens, and Crane—that Mount Rushmore of modernism—difficulty became a criterion for appraising poetic value. The difficulty of composition was extended to the compass of the reader’s experience. Opacity became so closely associated with modernist poetry that readers fled in droves into the waiting arms of novelists, where they could relax in the familiar surroundings of social realism. Of course, the conceptual demands some poems make on their reader can provide an essential pleasure, but this is hardly a recommended starting place for readers interested in reclaiming their connection to poetry. Lacking the experience to distinguish between legitimate difficulty and obscurity for its own sake, some readers give up entirely. Randall Jarrell said that poetry was so difficult to write, why should it be difficult to read. Clarity is the real risk in poetry. To be clear means opening yourself up to judgment. The willfully obscure poem is a hiding place where the poet can elude the reader and thus make appraisal impossible, irrelevant—a bourgeois intrusion upon the poem. Which is why much of the commentary on obscure poetry produces the same kind of headache as the poems themselves.

Of course, the more difficult the poem, the more de- pendent students are on their teachers. Knotty poems give teachers more to explain; but the classroom emphasis on what a poem means can work effectively to kill the poetry spirit. Too often the hunt for Meaning becomes the only approach; literary devices form a field of barbed wire that students must crawl under to get to “what the poet is try- ing to say,” a regrettable phrase which implies that every poem is a failed act of communication. Explication may dominate the teaching of poetry, but there are other ways to increase a reader’s intimacy with a poem. A reader can write the poem out, just as Keats or Frost did, or learn how to say a poem out loud, or even internalize a poem by memorizing it. The problem is that none of these activities requires the presence of a teacher. Ideally, interpretation should be one of the pleasures poetry offers. Unfortu- nately, too often it overshadows the other pleasures of meter, sound, metaphor, and imaginative travel, to name a few.

POETRY 180 WAS ALSO MEANT TO EXPOSE HIGH SCHOOL students to the new voices in contemporary poetry. Even if teachers try to keep up with the poetry of the day, textbooks and anthologies typically lag behind the times. My rough count of one popular introductory text has dead authors beating out living ones at a ratio of nine to one. And oddly enough, many of the poems that are still presented as examples of “modern” poetry—Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” or Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow”—were written more than seventy-five years ago. With a few exceptions, the poems selected for the Poetry 180 website and this book were chosen with the idea of catching the sounds, rhythms, and attitudes of poetry written much more recently. Some of the poems culled from literary magazines are no more than a year or two old. I ruled out any poem that had become a standard offering in textbooks and anthologies. I wanted also to include voices that were not well known. Quite a few of these poems were written by poets I had not heard of before I started scouting for the poems that would suit the purposes of Poetry 180. Assembling this anthology gave me a chance to further the cause of some of my favorite poems and also to discover poets who were new to me. The more I searched for poems, the more I became convinced that regardless of what other kinds of poems will be written in years to come, clear, reader-conscious poems are the ones that will broaden the audience of poetry beyond the precincts of its practitioners.

ADMITTEDLY, SOME OF THESE POEMS WERE SELECTED TO appeal to the interests of high school students. Mark Halliday and Jim Daniels both have poems about cars. Nick Flynn writes about the suspension of physical laws in cartoons. Edward Hirsch has a poem about basketball, and Louis Jenkins has one on football. There are poems about mothers and sons, fathers and daughters. And poems about teaching and learning. Tom Wayman’s hilarious and touching “Did I Miss Anything?” will appeal to anyone who has ever missed a class and then had the temerity to ask the teacher that impertinent question. But this anthology is meant for everyone, even if you somehow managed to avoid high school—that crucible where character is formed and where, as one student pointed out, they even make you read The Crucible.

One of the most haunting topics in literary discussion (right up there with the “Death of the Novel”) is the disappearance of the audience for poetry. Joyce Carol Oates has pointed out the lamentable fact that the number of poetry readers in this country is about the same as the number of people who write poetry. Based on my confrontations with students who want to write poetry but have no interest in reading it, I would say the poets might slightly outnumber the readers. Such a ratio should be kept in mind whenever we hear people extolling the phenomenon of a “poetry renaissance” in America. Yes, more poetry books are being published, and there are more contests, prizes, slams, open-mike nights, and MFA programs; but a large part of these activities take place within a closed circuit. In recent years, poetry has gained momentum as a cultural force, but much of its energy is expended tracing the same circle it has always moved in, appealing to the same insider audience.

Poetry need not be read by everyone—lots of intense activities have small audiences—but surely this distressing ratio can be changed so that poetry is enjoyed by people who have no professional interest in becoming poets. Poetry 180 is one of many efforts to change the ratio, to beckon people back to poetry by offering them a variety of poems that might snag their interest. I am convinced that for every nonreader of poetry there is a poem waiting to reconnect them to poetry. If a student hears a poem every day, the odds of he or she encountering the right poem increases dramatically. Ideally, Poetry 180 was aimed at creating a cognitive dissonance in students who “hate poetry” by exposing them to a poem they find themselves loving irresistibly.

THIS COLLECTION IS NOT AN EXACT TRANSCRIPTION OF the poems on the Poetry 180 website. Putting the poems into book form made it possible to include longer poems as well as poems that came to my attention after the website was put up. The website itself has movable parts; it is a kind of poetry jukebox where the songs can be changed and updated to keep the offerings fresh, especially for schools that want to continue to use the program one semester after another. This book, like all printed books, is fixed, but it includes as many different voices as possible to give a sense of the diverse chorus that is singing the songs of American poetry these days.

Unlike a book of prose fiction, which you read straight through following the rabbit of the plot, there are all sorts of ways to read a collection of poems. You can look up poets you are familiar with, you can flip through the pages looking for a title that grabs you, a shape that invites you in. Or you can read the collection cover to cover, forwards or backwards. But with Poetry 180, there is something to be said for starting at the beginning and reading just a poem or two each day. Like pills, for the head and the heart.

FOR MY OWN PART, POETRY 180 HAS BEEN A PLEASURE and a challenge. Finding the first one hundred poems was fairly easy. I just spun my mental Rolodex of contemporary poems that I liked well enough to remember. Locating the remaining eighty was harder, which might say something about the narrow bounds of my taste or the limited store of smart, clear, contemporary poems. I experienced the privilege of any anthologizer of being in control of the selections and thus being able to express through publication the kind of poetry I favor. With its original focus on high school audiences, Poetry 180 has a public service ring to it, but it is also, admittedly, a big bouquet of poems that I happen to like. To borrow Fran Liebowitz’s musical aesthetics: good poems are poems I like and bad poems are poems I don’t like. Putting that egocentric position aside, welcome to Poetry 180. Flip through the book and pick a poem, any poem. I know every one is an ace, or at least a face card, because I personally rigged the deck.

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	Introduction
1	Introduction to Poetry	3
2	Selecting a Reader	4
3	Not Bad, Dad, Not Bad	5
4	Singing Back the World	6
5	The Pink Car	8
6	Acting	10
7	The Cord	12
8	Ode: The Capris	14
9	Bringing My Son to the Police Station to Be Fingerprinted	17
10	On the Death of a Colleague	19
11	The Space Heater	21
12	Numbers	23
13	Lines	25
14	Listen	26
15	Unholy Sonnets	27
16	Poem for Salt	28
17	The Hand	29
18	Where I Was	30
19	hoop snake	32
20	Bestiary for the Fingers of My Right Hand	34
21	The Summer I Was Sixteen	36
22	Did I Miss Anything?	37
23	Song of Smoke	39
24	Autobiographia	41
25	White Towels	42
26	To You	43
27	It's Raining in Love	44
28	Moderation Kills (Excusez-Moi, Je Suis Sick as a Dog)	46
29	Mrs. Midas	49
30	The Oldest Living Thing in L.A.	53
31	Little Father	54
32	Alzheimer's	55
33	The Book of Hand Shadows	56
34	Sidekicks	57
35	A Poetry Reading at West Point	58
36	Only One of My Deaths	60
37	I'm A Fool to Love You	61
38	Love Poem 1990	63
39	Passer-by, these are words...	65
40	Wheels	66
41	Rain	68
42	A Myopic Child	69
43	At the Other End of the Telescope	70
44	praise song	73
45	The Man into Whose Yard You Should Not Hit Your Ball	74
46	The Farewell	76
47	The Partial Explanation	77
48	Poem for Adlai Stevenson and Yellow Jackets	78
49	The Late Passenger	80
50	On a 3 1/2 Oz. Lesser Yellowlegs, Departed Boston August 28, Shot Martinique September 3	83
51	Tour	84
52	After Us	85
53	Poetry	87
54	The Fathers	88
55	The High School Band	89
56	The Bell	90
57	Dearborn North Apartments Chicago, Illinois	91
58	Gouge, Adze, Rasp, Hammer	92
59	The Bruise of This	94
60	1-800-HOT-RIBS	95
61	The Printer's Error	97
62	Cartoon Physics, part 1	101
63	Advice from the Experts	103
64	She Didn't Mean to Do It	104
65	Snow	105
66	Six One-Line Film-Scripts	107
67	I Finally Managed to Speak to Her	108
68	Before She Died	109
69	In the Well	110
70	The Sonogram	111
71	Love Like Salt	112
72	Through the Window of the All-Night Restaurant	113
73	The Assassination of John Lennon as Depicted by the Madame Tussaud Wax Museum, Niagara Falls, Ontario, 1987	115
74	Barbie's Ferrari	116
75	A Romance for the Wild Turkey	118
76	Ye White Antarctic Birds	119
77	St. Francis and the Sow	120
78	Killing the Animals	121
79	The Old Liberators	122
80	Sentimental Moment or Why Did the Baguette Cross the Road?	123
81	Grammar	124
82	Plague Victims Catapulted over Walls into Besieged City	125
83	In Tornado Weather	126
84	The Portuguese in Mergui	127
85	No Return	129
86	The Panic Bird	130
87	A Hunger	132
88	Otherwise	133
89	Happy Marriage	134
90	At Navajo Monument Valley Tribal School	136
91	Hamlet Off-Stage: Laertes Cool	138
92	Lesson	139
93	Football	140
94	Fat Is Not a Fairy Tale	141
95	Sister Cat	142
96	The Bagel	143
97	On Swimming	144
98	Song Beside a Sippy Cup	145
99	Watching the Mayan Women	146
100	Queen Herod	148
101	Video Blues	152
102	Smoking	153
103	Old Men Playing Basketball	154
104	Gratitude to Old Teachers	156
105	June 11	157
106	Vegetarian Physics	158
107	My Life	159
108	Nuclear Winter	161
109	Message: Bottle #32	162
110	Waves	163
111	no. 6	164
112	Tuesday Morning, Loading Pigs	166
113	For Mohammed Zeid, Age 15	168
114	Small Comfort	170
115	Skin	171
116	Telephone Repairman	173
117	What I Would Do	175
118	The Meadow	177
119	Rotary	178
120	Sax's and Selves	181
121	Black Leather Because Bumblebees Look Like It	183
122	Beyond Recall	185
123	Alley Cat Love Song	187
124	Goodbye to the Old Life	188
125	For "Fiddle-De-De"	191
126	Country Fair	194
127	Part of Eve's Discussion	195
128	Birth Day	196
129	On Not Flying to Hawaii	197
130	The Poem of Chalk	199
131	My Father's Hats	202
132	Of Politics & Art	203
133	Loud Music	205
134	Elevator Music	207
135	A Wreath to the Fish	208
136	ballplayer	210
137	The Green One over There	212
138	May	215
139	The Quest	217
140	In Simili Materia	219
141	Words for Worry	220
142	In Praise of BIC Pens	221
143	The Other World	223
144	The Grammar Lesson	225
145	Fast Break	226
146	The Invention of Heaven	228
147	Saturday at the Canal	229
148	Doing Without	230
149	The Death of Santa Claus	231
150	Ladies and Gentlemen in Outer Space	233
151	Thanksgiving	234
152	Dog's Death	235
153	Hound Song	236
154	A Metaphor Crosses the Road	237
155	The Swan at Edgewater Park	238
156	The Blizzard	239
157	Where is She?	241
158	Coffee in the Afternoon	242
159	One Morning	243
160	Animals	244
161	God Says Yes to Me	245
162	The Perfect Heart	246
163	The Birthday	247
164	Not Swans	248
165	I Wish in the City of Your Heart	249
166	The Accompanist	252
167	The Wolf of Gubbio	252
168	49[superscript th] Birthday Trip (What Are You On?)	254
169	How Many Times	255
170	The History of Poetry	256
171	The Dead	258
172	Social Security	259
173	The Student Theme	261
174	Smell and Envy	262
175	The Yawn	263
176	Blue Willow	263
177	Tuesday 9:00 AM	265
178	Ordinance on Arrival	267
179	96 Vandam	268
180	What He Thought	269
	Notes on the Contributors	273
	Index of Contributors	305
	Index of Titles	309
	Permission Credits	313

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First Chapter

poetry 180: AN INTRODUCTION

A FEW YEARS AGO I FOUND MYSELF ON A CIRCUIT OF readings, traveling around the Midwest from podium to podium. One stop was at an enormous high school south of Chicago. Despite its daunting size—picture a row of lockers receding into infinity—the school holds a “Poetry Day” every year featuring an exuberant range of activities, including poems set to music by students and performed by the high school chorus and a ninety-piece orchestra. As featured poet that year, I found myself caught up in the high spirits of the day, which seemed to be coming directly from the students themselves, rather than being faculty-imposed. After reading to a crowded auditorium, I was approached by a student who presented me with a copy of the school newspaper containing an article she had written about poetry. In that article, I found a memorable summary of the discomfort so many people seem to experience with poetry. “Whenever I read a modern poem,” this teenage girl wrote, “it’s like my brother has his foot on the back of my neck in the swimming pool.”

Poetry 180 was inspired by the desire to remove poetry far from such scenes of torment. The idea behind this printed collection, which is a version of the Library of Congress “180” website, was to assemble a generous selection of short, clear, contemporary poems which any listener could basically “get” on first hearing—poems whose injection of pleasure is immediate. The original website, which continues to be up and running strong, www.loc.gov/poetry/180, is part of a national initiative I developed shortly afterbeing appointed United States Poet Laureate in 2001. The program is called “Poetry 180: A Poem a Day for American High Schools.” In creating it, I had hoped the program would suggest to young people the notion that poetry can be a part of everyday life as well as a subject to be studied in the classroom. On the website, I ask high school teachers and administrators to adopt the program by having a new poem read every day—one for each of the roughly 180 days of the school year—as part of the public announcements. Whether the poems are read over a PA system or at the end of a school assembly, students can hear poetry on a daily basis without feeling any pressure to respond. I wanted teachers to refrain from commenting on the poems or asking students “literary” questions about them. No discussion, no explication, no quiz, no midterm, no seven-page paper—just listen to a poem every morning and off you go to your first class.

I might not have come up with such an ambitious national plan—or any plan at all—were it not for the energetic efforts made by previous laureates to spread the word of poetry far and wide. Prior to the democratizing efforts of Joseph Brodsky, who envisioned poetry being handed out at supermarkets and planted in the bed tables of motel rooms next to the Gideon Bible, the post of poet laureate was centered at the Library of Congress in Washington, specifically in a spacious suite of rooms at the top of the magnificent Jefferson Building, complete with a balcony and, as one visi- tor put it, a “CNN view” of the Capitol. In those days, the position was called “Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress”—admittedly, a mouthful with a businesslike sound. It was the habit of many Consultants to relocate to Washington, go to the office a few days a week, and—I can only imagine—wait for the phone to ring. You never knew when some senator would be curious to know who wrote “Two Tramps in Mud Time.” According to Mary Jarrell’s memoir, she and Randall took advantage of his tenure in the nation’s capital by enjoying cultural offerings such as the Budapest string quartet. Maxine Kumin invited Washington-area schoolchildren to the Poetry Room. Robert Penn Warren wisely devoted one of his terms to the writing of All the King’s Men. But by the time I took office, the laureateship had evolved into a seat from which resourceful plans for the national dissemination of poetry were being launched. And so Poetry 180 became my contribution.

High school is the focus of my program because all too often it is the place where poetry goes to die. While poetry offers us the possibility of modulating our pace, adolescence is commonly driven by the wish to accelerate, to get from zero to sixty in a heartbeat or in a speed-shop Honda. And de- spite the sometimes heroic efforts of dedicated teachers, many adolescents find poetry—to use their term of ultimate condemnation—boring. What some students experience when they are made to confront a poem might be summed up in a frustrating syllogism:

I understand English.

This poem is written in English.

I have no idea what this poem is saying.

What is “the misfit witch blocks my quantum path?” a reader might well ask. What’s up with “a waveform leaps in my belly”? What’s a reader to do in the face of such unyielding obtuseness?

But let us hear from the other side of the room. If there is no room in poetry for difficulty, where is difficulty to go? Just as poetry provides a home for ambiguity, it offers difficulty a place to be dramatized if not solved. “Even in our games,” asserts John Ciardi, “we demand difficulty.” Which explains why hockey is played on ice and why chess involves more than two warring queens chasing each other around the board. During the heyday of Pound, Eliot, Stevens, and Crane—that Mount Rushmore of modernism—difficulty became a criterion for appraising poetic value. The difficulty of composition was extended to the compass of the reader’s experience. Opacity became so closely associated with modernist poetry that readers fled in droves into the waiting arms of novelists, where they could relax in the familiar surroundings of social realism. Of course, the conceptual demands some poems make on their reader can provide an essential pleasure, but this is hardly a recommended starting place for readers interested in reclaiming their connection to poetry. Lacking the experience to distinguish between legitimate difficulty and obscurity for its own sake, some readers give up entirely. Randall Jarrell said that poetry was so difficult to write, why should it be difficult to read. Clarity is the real risk in poetry. To be clear means opening yourself up to judgment. The willfully obscure poem is a hiding place where the poet can elude the reader and thus make appraisal impossible, irrelevant—a bourgeois intrusion upon the poem. Which is why much of the commentary on obscure poetry produces the same kind of headache as the poems themselves.

Of course, the more difficult the poem, the more de- pendent students are on their teachers. Knotty poems give teachers more to explain; but the classroom emphasis on what a poem means can work effectively to kill the poetry spirit. Too often the hunt for Meaning becomes the only approach; literary devices form a field of barbed wire that students must crawl under to get to “what the poet is try- ing to say,” a regrettable phrase which implies that every poem is a failed act of communication. Explication may dominate the teaching of poetry, but there are other ways to increase a reader’s intimacy with a poem. A reader can write the poem out, just as Keats or Frost did, or learn how to say a poem out loud, or even internalize a poem by memorizing it. The problem is that none of these activities requires the presence of a teacher. Ideally, interpretation should be one of the pleasures poetry offers. Unfortu- nately, too often it overshadows the other pleasures of meter, sound, metaphor, and imaginative travel, to name a few.

POETRY 180 WAS ALSO MEANT TO EXPOSE HIGH SCHOOL students to the new voices in contemporary poetry. Even if teachers try to keep up with the poetry of the day, textbooks and anthologies typically lag behind the times. My rough count of one popular introductory text has dead authors beating out living ones at a ratio of nine to one. And oddly enough, many of the poems that are still presented as examples of “modern” poetry—Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” or Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow”—were written more than seventy-five years ago. With a few exceptions, the poems selected for the Poetry 180 website and this book were chosen with the idea of catching the sounds, rhythms, and attitudes of poetry written much more recently. Some of the poems culled from literary magazines are no more than a year or two old. I ruled out any poem that had become a standard offering in textbooks and anthologies. I wanted also to include voices that were not well known. Quite a few of these poems were written by poets I had not heard of before I started scouting for the poems that would suit the purposes of Poetry 180. Assembling this anthology gave me a chance to further the cause of some of my favorite poems and also to discover poets who were new to me. The more I searched for poems, the more I became convinced that regardless of what other kinds of poems will be written in years to come, clear, reader-conscious poems are the ones that will broaden the audience of poetry beyond the precincts of its practitioners.

ADMITTEDLY, SOME OF THESE POEMS WERE SELECTED TO appeal to the interests of high school students. Mark Halliday and Jim Daniels both have poems about cars. Nick Flynn writes about the suspension of physical laws in cartoons. Edward Hirsch has a poem about basketball, and Louis Jenkins has one on football. There are poems about mothers and sons, fathers and daughters. And poems about teaching and learning. Tom Wayman’s hilarious and touching “Did I Miss Anything?” will appeal to anyone who has ever missed a class and then had the temerity to ask the teacher that impertinent question. But this anthology is meant for everyone, even if you somehow managed to avoid high school—that crucible where character is formed and where, as one student pointed out, they even make you read The Crucible.

One of the most haunting topics in literary discussion (right up there with the “Death of the Novel”) is the disappearance of the audience for poetry. Joyce Carol Oates has pointed out the lamentable fact that the number of poetry readers in this country is about the same as the number of people who write poetry. Based on my confrontations with students who want to write poetry but have no interest in reading it, I would say the poets might slightly outnumber the readers. Such a ratio should be kept in mind whenever we hear people extolling the phenomenon of a “poetry renaissance” in America. Yes, more poetry books are being published, and there are more contests, prizes, slams, open-mike nights, and MFA programs; but a large part of these activities take place within a closed circuit. In recent years, poetry has gained momentum as a cultural force, but much of its energy is expended tracing the same circle it has always moved in, appealing to the same insider audience.

Poetry need not be read by everyone—lots of intense activities have small audiences—but surely this distressing ratio can be changed so that poetry is enjoyed by people who have no professional interest in becoming poets. Poetry 180 is one of many efforts to change the ratio, to beckon people back to poetry by offering them a variety of poems that might snag their interest. I am convinced that for every nonreader of poetry there is a poem waiting to reconnect them to poetry. If a student hears a poem every day, the odds of he or she encountering the right poem increases dramatically. Ideally, Poetry 180 was aimed at creating a cognitive dissonance in students who “hate poetry” by exposing them to a poem they find themselves loving irresistibly.

THIS COLLECTION IS NOT AN EXACT TRANSCRIPTION OF the poems on the Poetry 180 website. Putting the poems into book form made it possible to include longer poems as well as poems that came to my attention after the website was put up. The website itself has movable parts; it is a kind of poetry jukebox where the songs can be changed and updated to keep the offerings fresh, especially for schools that want to continue to use the program one semester after another. This book, like all printed books, is fixed, but it includes as many different voices as possible to give a sense of the diverse chorus that is singing the songs of American poetry these days.

Unlike a book of prose fiction, which you read straight through following the rabbit of the plot, there are all sorts of ways to read a collection of poems. You can look up poets you are familiar with, you can flip through the pages looking for a title that grabs you, a shape that invites you in. Or you can read the collection cover to cover, forwards or backwards. But with Poetry 180, there is something to be said for starting at the beginning and reading just a poem or two each day. Like pills, for the head and the heart.

FOR MY OWN PART, POETRY 180 HAS BEEN A PLEASURE and a challenge. Finding the first one hundred poems was fairly easy. I just spun my mental Rolodex of contemporary poems that I liked well enough to remember. Locating the remaining eighty was harder, which might say something about the narrow bounds of my taste or the limited store of smart, clear, contemporary poems. I experienced the privilege of any anthologizer of being in control of the selections and thus being able to express through publication the kind of poetry I favor. With its original focus on high school audiences, Poetry 180 has a public service ring to it, but it is also, admittedly, a big bouquet of poems that I happen to like. To borrow Fran Liebowitz’s musical aesthetics: good poems are poems I like and bad poems are poems I don’t like. Putting that egocentric position aside, welcome to Poetry 180. Flip through the book and pick a poem, any poem. I know every one is an ace, or at least a face card, because I personally rigged the deck.

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DickensLoverEP

Posted December 27, 2009

Poetry 180 is on the right side of the poetry battle.

When reading poetry in high school, do you remember running into the concept of "universality," that good poems will take a reader through the private experience of the poem into reflecting on some aspect of his own life, to what is the universal experience of all or most people?

Poetry 180 comes down on the side of the poetry debate that believes good poetry is not some personal, academic secret code largely unknown and undecipherable to the general, poetry reading public. Rather, Billy Collins asserts that good poetry consists of poems that are "accessible" to the general reader, meaning that such poems invite the reader into the poem, instead of leaving him feeling like he is outside the bounds of the inner circle of poets and poetry lovers.

The introductions to Poetry 180, and the sequel, 180 More are worth the price of the books themselves. In Poetry 180, check out the poems, "Listen", "Did I miss anything?", "It's Raining in Love" and "Alzheimer's".

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Anonymous

Posted March 5, 2008

So Amazing!

I really enjoyed that the poems are read-able and like-able but they also have depth and meaning. They are good and true. Billy Collins is an amazing poet and he deserves a lot of credit for his work! I highly recommend this book for people starting to read or enjoy poetry. It definitely helps to get the jist of poetry.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Anonymous

Posted November 6, 2004

great teaching tool

Actually, this book is great for teachers looking for somewhere to start with poetry in the classroom. This book is based on a program for HIGH SCHOOL students, to expose them to great poets, and to familiarize them with form, style, and so on, so as to encourage further curiosity. This book was put together by Collins as a 'jumping off point,' and it succeeds at being just that. The Poetry 180 website further explains the program and the idea behind it for anyone interested; maybe it's not the 'greatest anthology ever created,' but it should be appreciated as a collection geared toward first-time readers of poetry!

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Anonymous

Posted February 10, 2004

A haphazard selection

There are a gazillion poetry anthologies on the market, some better, some worse, some quite comprehensive, some eclectic with a discernible slant. Billy Collins, a rather entertaining and usually smart poet (although often lacking in depth), has done himself and poetry a disservice here by hurling his name into the crowded field of anthology editors with this haphazard selection that's neither comprehensive nor eclectic -- it's just superficial. This is one book money is wasted on; for poetry lovers, I would recommend any of the recent editions of the 'Best American Poetry' series instead (especially those of 2000 and 2003), or the excellent collection 'Poetry Daily: Poems from the World's Most Popular Poetry Website'.

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Sarah18SS

Posted May 16, 2011

more from this reviewer

Sarah

well i LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!this book so mush one of my fav.s read this now doint just sit there pick this book up and read it you'll be suprized*
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Posted March 20, 2010

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Posted October 20, 2008

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Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry

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Poetry 180 is on the right side of the poetry battle.

So Amazing!

great teaching tool

A haphazard selection

Sarah