I was given a magazine today. Smithsonian, March 2012. Nice rendering of the Titanic on the cover, like the mural art depiction of it I saw in a building in Baltimore.
Second page, “Contributors”
Second entry, Billy Collins, with this description:
“Billy Collins, SMITHSONIAN’s new Poetry Consultant, is the two-time poet laureate of the United States. He has been called “the most popular poet in America” by the New York Times. Although he rarely writes on a commissioned subject, he wrote “The Unfortunate Traveler” (p. 43) specially for our Photography Issue. “I always think that I can’t follow orders very well — which is one reason I’m a poet,” he says.”
So I flipped to page 43, and read “The Unfortunate Traveler”.
Hmm. Maybe I missed something.
So I looked up some of his work on the internet. It was pretty much the same.
Maybe I’m missing something.
Maybe, like Pablo Neruda, he writes the original in another language, and it is of course luminously beautiful.
Somewhere, somewhen, someone must have told this fellow he is a poet. He seems to have taken it to heart, and believed it, for he says himself that he is a poet.
Maybe I’m just missing something.
. . .
Well, you folks mull this over, then. I’m going to go write a poem.
Sounds like he went to the Maya Angelou School of writng poetry...if he’s as bad as you indicate!
I can’t stand that former madam!