According to the New York Times, the City University of New York

is proposing that everyone at the university dip into "Sailing Alone: New and Selected Poems" by Billy Collins as part of its new "CUNY Is Reading . . . " program. The university plans to introduce a new book each year. To inaugurate the program, Mr. Collins, who is poet laureate of the United States and a CUNY distinguished professor, read from "Sailing Alone," and some of his other books, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art last week. At the reading, he explained that CUNY's executive vice chancellor, Louise Mirrer, had asked him for suggestions for a book the whole university might read together. He said that he considered recommending books by other authors, but after a brief internal struggle, recommended his own new paperback anthology.

Caught up in the excitement, the Times made a slight slip. The title of Poet Laureate Collins's anthology is not Sailing Alone, though such a mistake is explainable. Sailing Alone, recalling Joshua Slocum's Sailing Alone Around the World, is the sort of title that one might expect from a poet laureate. It would be pompous perhaps, but it would signal a poet who understands that claiming such a large scope might well require being alone, being unpopular, in order to say what needs to be said. Unlike the real poet laureate, the sort of poet who would write a book entitled Sailing Alone probably wouldn't produce bestsellers, or give interviews to Entertainment Weekly, or be profiled in InStyle. Presumably, when allowed to recommend any book for an entire university to read, he would think beyond his own.

The actual title of Billy Collins's anthology of his greatest hits is Sailing Alone Around the Room, a far more amicable title than Sailing Alone. The poems in the 2001 edition reveal that the room is a comfortable one and suburban, though not of the suburbia we know to find frightening thanks to John Cheever or David Lynch. The world Collins has carved out for himself is well-meaning and decent, with its occasional moments of mild amusement. Several of his poems are about either going away on European vacations or deciding not to go away on European vacations, with the theme in those poems the same: “how much better to command the simple precinct of home.” Collins is willing to sail alone, but not for more than a few feet.

The first poem in the collection, “Another Reason Why I Don't Keep a Gun in the House,” makes a joke out of its intimations of seriousness. The reason?

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking
He is barking that same high, rhythmic bark
That he barks every time they leave the house.

Like many of Collins's poems, the gag—there is nearly always a gag—derives from the gap between the title and the content of the poem. A poem on “Fishing on the Susquehanna in July” tells how the narrator has actually never been fishing on the Susquehanna “or on any river for that matter / to be perfectly honest.” “American Sonnet” is not a sonnet but an argument that the closest Americans come these days to writing sonnets is on postcards: “we locate an adjective for the weather. / We announce that we are having a wonderful time.” Collins's poems are anecdotal, usually framed around a single event, and entirely self-contained. There is often a joke embedded in the poem's final line. A sampling: “it is very late, even for musicians”; “down a road that will never lead to Rome, not even Bologna”; “a decent bottle of Italian, no wait…make that Chilean red”; “It's not like that. Not exactly.” Collins's poems end with qualifications that release their tension. They end with sighs, as if their author has given up.

In the poem “Consolation,” the narrator claims “How agreeable it is not to be touring Italy this summer”:

How much better to cruise these local, familiar streets,
Fully grasping the meaning of every road sign and billboard
And all the sudden hand gestures of my compatriots.

The style might be in the vein of John Ashbery, but the whimsy is slower—and duller.

The narrator wants to be where he understands every idiom: “Why hide my head in phrase books and wrinkled maps?” He's much happier when he merely heads “down to the coffee shop and the waitress / known as Dot” who knows how he likes his eggs.

As if the narrator of Collins's poem were also his ideal reader, the poems present nothing unfamiliar; all is as commonplace as the signs and billboards in one's hometown. They ask nothing of their reader beyond the challenge of getting the joke of their titles. Words that usually characterize one thing are only rarely allowed to designate something different—a criterion for metaphor—because that might be too alienating.

Collins has little interest in set forms or rhyme or meter. His poems are meant to imitate the sounds of speech, mini-essays broken up into stanzas. They don't fully justify themselves as poems; there is no compression or intensity, no startling image. They often have some rhythm, but they never quite make music. As even Collins's admirers admit, one leaves his poems understanding their theme, but no line divorced from its context has the power to haunt. Yet these must be poems because

nowadays typing a
paragraph
and pressing the
Enter key every
few
words
is how we
separate
poetry from
prose.

In his latest collection, Nine Horses, Collins does pack up and go to Italy (in “By a Swimming Pool Outside Siracusa”) and also has poems titled “Paris,” “Istanbul,” and “Bermuda.” Here Collins begins to do some of his most interesting work. The shock of travel, the force of the unfamiliar, allows his language to become more imaginative. In Italy, “I can feel my English slipping away, / like chlorinated water through my fingers.” Not a brilliant simile, but an attempt. And yet, even abroad, there's still the same unwillingness to explore. In “Istanbul,” the narrator tells us “It was an odd and eye-opening sensation / to be led by a man with close-cropped hair,” but that's not sufficient. Poetry is capable of so much more—of creating the sensation, on the page, of the odd and the eye-opening—but Collins does not even try. He continues to describe being lathered up in a Turkish bathhouse, his narrator's relief to be “facedown in a warm puddle of soap / and not a warm puddle of blood / in some corner of this incomprehensible city.” The prosaisms “warm puddle of soap” and “warm puddle of blood,” even in confluence, do not create sensations. The city is “incomprehensible,” and the poem does not take up the challenge of interpretation.

When Collins does decide to obey a set form, he goes all out, choosing to write “A Paradelle for Susan,” which a footnote handily explains is “one of the more demanding French fixed forms.” So he does it. The final stanza does indeed use every word used in the preceding stanzas and only those words. But the effect is purposefully inelegant. The end of each stanza merely calls attention to the difficulty of the task, evolving into grammatical gobbledygook. “Always nervous, I perched on your highest bird the” ends the first stanza. “Darken the mountain, time and find was my way into it/ was with to to,” ends the poem. A form provides discipline, but the point of the poem must be about more than the poet's ability to obey the rules. Collins's paradelle becomes a joke, as if saying, “See how silly these poetic conventions are? We won't bother with any of those again.”

Along with writing about his dog and his neighbors' dog, and the next most frequent topic—how difficult it is to write a poem—Collin likes to rewrite famous, beloved poems in his own style. And so Collins presents us with “Dancing Toward Bethlehem,” and “Monday Morning,” (about a student whose crisis is that she's about to fail an exam, “who sits in her sunny chair/with a container of coffee and an orange”). In “Lines Composed Over Three Thousand Miles from Tintern Abbey” the narrator realizes:

But the feeling is always the same.
It was better the first time.
This time is not nearly as good.
I'm not feeling as chipper as I did back then.

Such a poem seems the literary equivalent of Christmas cards that depict Van Gogh's “Starry Night” with Santa's sleigh flying over the rooftops—though at least, in that case, much of the painting is still left intact for appreciation. These poems are not sufficiently funny to work as parodies of Yeats, Stevens, and Wordsworth. At the same time, they are not substantial enough in themselves to stand alone.

Collins's grand project as poet laureate is called “Poetry 180,” a program that encourages high school students to recite contemporary verse, handpicked by Collins, over their school loudspeakers. In an interview with The Times Picayune, Collins explained, “There's a waiting audience out there that was frightened away by Modernist poetry in school. You feel alienated from your own language, which is unpleasant.” In response, all of the poems chosen for Poetry 180 are overwhelmingly “pleasant”—if pleasantry means merely never having to strain one's brow. Dylan Thomas wrote of how “the world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it,” but, for Collins, poetry should never change the world, should never make anyone feel “alienated.”

In the inaugural poem for Poetry 180, Collins chose one of his earliest, aptly titled “Introduction to Poetry,” in which he declares what he asks of his readers.

I want them to water-ski
Across the surface of a poem
Waving at the author's name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie a 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 really means.

Collins has said that his poems are meant to work completely on their first reading. They do. His poems really mean what they clearly say they mean. Part of the reason I suspect Collins's poems have proved so popular is that they tell a message people so badly want to be told: poetry should be easy listening, a mere “water-ski” on its surface. Even if you were to work through a difficult poem, the result wouldn't be worth the effort anyway. The poem's point would only be something along the lines of “I'm not feeling as chipper as I did back then,” and so the poet might as well just write it out and get it over with.

In a review of Collins's Sailing Alone Around the Room published last year in the Yale Review of Books, Allie Stielau defended Collins's poems by arguing that “their very simplicity and clarity are consciously crafted to assuage the qualms of unfamiliar readers. The key motivation behind his work is an attempt to promote the reading of poetry, and to place poetry in the context of Americans' everyday lives.” But is this really enough? What's the point of promoting the reading of poetry if the poems being promoted aren't worth reading?

Accessibility is not a sin. Claiming that a poem is easy to understand does not at all imply that it was easy to write, for often just the opposite is true. But true art holds its own. It withstands scrutiny. We can water-ski on a poem's surface, but we should also be allowed to dive deep. Appreciation of a poem ought to grow with study, while, at the same time, the poem should remain in itself more interesting than anything that can be said about it. True poems cannot be tortured, and they resist all beatings.

.