the trouble with poetry reviewers

David Orr has reviewed Billy Collins' new collection "The Trouble With Poetry" for the NYT Book Review--and he's written the review in verse as a (sometimes mocking) parody of Collins. Here's a taste:

It is a typical Collins beginning -
a good-natured wave
across the echoing gulf that stretches

between writer and reader,
as if to suggest
the poem itself exists

in that uncertain, cloud-strewn gap,
and we, as readers,
are very nearly poets ourselves,

even if we are unlikely
to receive recognition as such
in the form of a generous grant

from the Guggenheim Foundation,
which is not to say
we would turn one down, mind you.

Orr's been snarky (well, actually, downright bitchy) about other popular poets in this column, and while this review did made me laugh, it skates along the border between amusing tongue-in-cheek and meanspirited mocking. But I do think he's onto something in his core critique of Collins' work:

In the end, what we need
from a poet with Collins's talent
is not a good-natured wave

from writer to reader,
or a literary joke, or a mild chuckle;
what we need is to be drawn

high into the poem's cloud-filled air
and allowed to fall
on rocks real enough to hurt.

I don't think it's really Orr's right to declare what poets ought to do; if Collins wants to go for the mild chuckle, for a poetry that does not take itself over-seriously, then fine, he's the writer and he has sovereignty. But the criticism rang true, because although I've been amused, even delighted by some of the poems of his I've read (especially "Introduction to Poetry" and "The Last Cigarette"), none of them have gobsmacked me. I've never been turned inside-out by a Collins poem, never been haunted by one during an insomniac night, never typed one out painstakingly to email to a friend, never copied his words in a notebook to bring on a many-month stint in non-English-speaking countries, because it seemed essential that I carry these words with me, as ballast.