I don’t like Billy Collins.

There. I said it.

It’s nothing personal. I don’t know the man personally. I just don’t like his poetry.

I don’t necessarily object to poetry that is – shall we say – middlebrow? Without getting into a long discussion, I think we can agree the Collins is not an avatar of the high modernism, or post-avant, or what not. That alone is not a statement on his quality as a poet. Robert Frost is not any of those things either, but I think we can all agree that he’s still pretty awesome.

Picnic, Lightning is why I don’t like him.

Collins specializes in a classic American anti-intellectualism (if you want to argue about this topic, let me just direct you to Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life and let him argue with you for me). It’s a sort of populist,  “aw shucks” demeanor that posits a faux pragmatism against the silly, nerdy obfuscators.

Fine. Peter Meinke‘s The Poet, Trying to Surprise God is a poem I greatly enjoy and is in the same “aw shucks” vein – as are many of Meinke’s poems.

What I object to is the shameless way Collins tries to have it both ways. Playing the anti-intellectual card and then taking the name of his collection from Nabokov – one of the most intellectual, arch, and hyper-literate writers this side of James Joyce.

I do not appreciate him playing the populist card and then turning to the university English departments and winking at them, as if to say, “I really didn’t mean it.”