I am not a fan of Billy Collins. I have not been reticent about that. So that’s why I want to highlight this blog post by Elisa at The French Exit which provides a lovely critique of Collin’s poetic ideology.

I’ll let Elisa speak for herself.

I went to a reading and talk by Thomas Lux yesterday, and I was disappointed to hear him espousing Collinsian rhetoric (he actually name-checked Billy Collins) to the effect that poetry should be “accessible,” the poem should be “hospitable,” and even that difficult poetry is “rude.”

I don’t understand this mindset. It’s one thing to prefer a simple, straightforward, user-friendly, and personable poetics. It’s quite another to turn your tastes into an ideology, to frame accessibility as some kind of moral imperative. How exactly are we supposed to manage the arts so that everything is equally “accessible”? And isn’t “accessibility” almost entirely subjective, depending on one’s education, class, race, sex, culture, and so on, not intelligence per se? Accessibility, as far as I’m concerned, is racist (and sexist), because it’s defined so often by white men who assume that what is accessible to them is accessible to everyone. (Sorry to be picking on white men this week; fight racism with racism I guess.)

If you like “accessible” poetry (whatever that means to you), then write and read accessible poetry. But leave me my Stevens (not accessible at all), my Anne Carson, my Lyn Hejinian, my Kirsten Kaschock. You can have your Billy Collins.