A MAJOR MINOR POET: Billy Collins isn't just funny - poet laureate

Billy Collins being named poet laureate was good news to me, yet I think the first words that ran through my head, after hearing of the appointment, were, "They've actually had the guts to honor someone who writes light verse? Ogden Nash should have been so lucky!"

Like a lot of first reactions, it was wrong. But, like all first reactions, it had its reasons.

Light verse jingles along within neatly hedged stanzas. It's the interplay between the poet's fantasticality and the precise meters and nimble rhymes that produces the humor of, for instance, Hilaire Belloc's description (in "Matilda") of eager-beaver firemen "saving" a Victorian mansion that isn't really burning: "They ran their ladders through a score / Of windows on the ball room floor / And took peculiar pains to souse / The pictures up and down the house."

Billy Collins doesn't brandish rhyme or meter or pattern that way. His poems can make you laugh, but their sound effects are muted and help achieve a dry whimsicality that brings to mind the comedian Bob Newhart or the cartoonist Charles Schultz rather than any other poet. Collins's recent volume of new and collected verse bears the pleasant title, Sailing Alone around the Room (Random House), but The Button-Down Mind of Billy Collins might have been just as apt. Perhaps it's my associating Collins with comic entertainers that made me think of him as a maker of light, comic verse. But there's something else.

I often have occasion to read light verse to children, and I get the same pleasure from reciting these little masterpieces the twentieth time as the first. But I never get more. The peculiar joy and the peculiar drawback of good light verse are that it defies time but it never grows with time. The same is true of most of Collins's poems.

Take "Pinup." The opening,

The murkiness of the local garage is not so dense

that you cannot make out the calendar of pinup

drawings on the wall above a bench of tools.

is typical Collins: a seemingly slouching gait concealing a basically iambic beat; an apparently rhymeless poem that contains the ghost of rhyme ("murkiness" with "dense"); a protagonist addressed in the second person because he could be Everyman (if not Everywoman) but who is actually Billy Collins not shirking the Everyman role.

Our hero flips through a calendar while a mechanic works on his car. Collins captures the coy, unintentionally comic appeal of the pinup girl, Miss March, with a relaxed, unprurient humanity:

One hand is busy keeping her hat down on her head

and the other is grasping the little dog's leash,

so of course there is no hand left to push down

her dress which is billowing up around her waist...

Oh, "of course" the poor dear can't help herself! And it is this gallant excuse-making of the onlooker that becomes the source of the poem's comedy. The hero is being protective not only of Miss March's essential innocence but of his own self-esteem. He refuses to think of himself as the horny creep that all porn, however softcore, tries to turn a man into. He consents to being an admiring observer but not a peeping Tom. And, since he is a Billy Collins hero, the onlooker carries his fantasy of gallantry as far as he can.

You would like to come to her rescue, gather up the little dog in your arms, untangle the leash, lead her to safety, and receive her bottomless gratitude, but

But the mechanic interrupts the reverie to explain that the repair is going to take longer and cost more than expected. Our hero calmly (gladly, we suspect) accepts the verdict and sidles back to the calendar. He may be gallant but he's also hooked. What does Miss April look like?

This is excellent comedy and good poetry. Reading it for the tenth time, I smiled, chuckled, laughed exactly at the parts I smiled, chuckled, laughed during the nine previous readings. Precisely what happens when I reread Nash and Belloc. Precisely what happens when I listen to The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart for the umpteenth time.

There is another connection to Newhart and other standup comedians. When Newhart asks us to imagine a public relations adviser urging Abe Lincoln to keep the Gettysburg Address the way the boys in the back room drafted it, it is the very situation that starts the listener laughing even before the jokes begin. The same goes for many a Collins poem. While most poets of the last hundred years make readers work their way into the meaning of a poem gingerly, Collins charms and entices right from the start with his provocative setups: "A sentence starts out like a lone traveler / heading into a blizzard at night" ("Winter Syntax"); "In the morning when I found History / snoring on the couch..." ("The Lesson"); "Remember the 1340s? / We were doing a dance called the Catapult" ("Nostalgia"); "Trying to protect his students' innocence / he told them the Ice Age was really just/ the Chilly Age, a period of a million years when everyone had to wear sweaters" ("The History Teacher"). Often Collins fulfills the promise of these crowd-pleasing openings, sometimes he doesn't, but he rarely lifts the entire poem to a plane far above the opening. There is much justice in Adam Kirsch's observation (New Republic, October 29, 2001): "the very easiness of the joke suggests its limitation....Once we remind ourselves that the target of the joke is merely an expression, the piling up of new details begins to seem a poor use of Collins's wit."