Billy Collins' "Snow Day" and the Gift of Gab

Sandhill Cranes

It seems everyone wants me to like Billy Collins’ poetry, and for the most part, I do. I especially like what he and the other makers of “the poetry of accessibility” have done for the popularity of poetry. They’ve created a likable product; they’ve even made it sell.

However, when I’m asked if I like Collins, Sharon Olds, Tony Hoagland, and others, I find myself feeling guarded. I think that has much to do with long-ish narratives and the premium they place on humor and charm.

Many “accessible” poems take a long time to deliver their punch, if there’s any sock-'em at all to go with the charm. I’m likely to find more reward, more left hook, more dirt and scabs and tobacco-spit, in addition to more lily-like beauty, in a single line of Hopkins, Dickinson, Yeats, Frost, Bishop, and others.

Why should I not ask poets to try for that power-per-line or at least power-per-stanza? I suppose one answer is that charming, winking, “accessible,” inoffensive poems sell better. So poems are Barbie Dolls? Buicks? Surely that’s a poisonous argument to anyone who cares about the art of poetry. 

Here’s a season-appropriate Billy Collins poem that I don’t dislike—mostly because of the originality and keen perception of the dog that will “porpoise through the drifts.”  Also the radio’s being specifically “plastic” somehow plants me nicely in the poem’s suburban world, although farms and cities probably have plastic radios too.

Snow Day by Billy Collins : The Poetry Foundation

But I’d drop the first two stanzas entirely, along with some of the ten cute names for elementary schools. If ten is an OK number, why not seventeen?

I’d rather hear more about the meanness of the girls. Should it prepare me for grown women? Should it worry me, especially when evolutionists say the female does the selecting of a mate? 

And by the way, if all the schools are closed, which three girls are plotting? And where? Where is the speaker now, that he might move close enough to hear their words?

And how much does any of that have to do with a snow day? 

Many of Billy Collins’ poems are richer, more urgent than “Snow Day.” If you wish, consider his poem "Silence":  

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/39

I’ve picked "Snow Day" instead because it might illustrate why some poetry hardliners and old-timers are leery of populist poetry and the apparent argument that poetry might amount to little more than the gift of gab. I hope we all want poetry to sell and poets to prosper, but I also hope we prefer gems to synthetics, poems to fortune cookies. 

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

Snow Day by Billy Collins : The Poetry Foundation

Emily Dickinson, "There’s been a Death, in the Opposite House"

There’s been a Death, in the Opposite House by Emily Dickinson : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.


Photos: a country graveyard in southern Ohio. These aren't my relatives; it’s just that I was struck by the theme of anonymity on some of the stones.

In my scouting over the last few weeks, I’ve been hitting Emily Dickinson poems that didn’t wow me. Then at a Mom&Pop lunch today (Romira’s, a good sop of chicken stir fry), I once again stumbled onto the well-known “There’s been a Death, in the Opposite House.” I hadn’t read it for years, and it struck me as E.D. at her best.

It also seemed a natural follow-up to Hirsch’s poems about Christopher Smart—that lost, essentially anonymous man, except for his insanity, that man who’s been resurrected by poetry—his own work and that of others who have loved his gentle spirit. Upon his death, surely Christopher Smart’s neighbors might have made some of E.D.’s remarks about him.



Maybe “There’s been a Death” should have depressed me, but I was so dazzled by some of the skill with language that the poem did what poetry is supposed to do: triumph over death, even as it examined death’s aftermath.



I especially like these un-sentimental details:

The speaker would know the decedent’s name in a small town, but E.D. insists upon his anonymity. It’s only a “Death, in the Opposite House.” The distancing from him as a personality begins immediately.

“Such Houses” have a “numb look.” Numbness is important in these situations; it’s a time for vultures, not Hallmark cards.

“A Window opens like a Pod—“ Like a pod it opens. Who else would have seen that?

The pea that falls from the pod is the decedent’s mattress. It is flung out “mechanically,” and children passing by, getting some value-added education, as they “wonder if it died—on that—“

It died on that! Death neuters the corpse, de-humanizes it. The kids’ understanding leads them to impersonal pronouns to portray what they see. The corpse is reduced to an object. Whatever else death does, it reduces; it demands that we see ourselves as matter; even if angels will be swooping in soon, we are, for a time, mere matter, an it.

The speaker, who was a boy once, can speak for the children because “he” remembers noticing and wondering about such things, upon passing such a house. About the gender switch: did little girls in Amherst around 1860 not notice and wonder about such things? Was it just too grisly a matter for girls to speak about? Maybe little girls were too homebound to be out and about and observing death’s aftermath? Whatever the reasons, Dickinson’s sense that she needs to speak as a male is curious.

The minister goes “stiffly” in. Don’t all ministers go stiffly, lest they be perceived as having un-puritan pleasure? And this minister has “owned” both the house and the mourners at such a time; ministers own little boys too.

Death makes good business for the clergy, for milliners and morticians. One has to wonder if such enterprises might like death. In addressing what a society does in the face of death, any writer could have fallen into facile, overwrought social criticism; I find Dickinson’s restraint tough and effective.



“We’re not very good at death,” a friend of mine once said, meaning we don’t know how to deal with it. Without lambasting her culture for its awkwardness concerning death, Dickinson points out deftly and quickly three trades that might be glad we have death for their continued prosperity. It’s just a fact, worth exposing, but not worth a rant.

Also in “just a Country Town’’ one wouldn’t want to lay it on too heavily against some pillars of the community. They might be superiors, or they might be pals; if it were the 1950s, you might have coffee with them tomorrow at Smitty’s Drug Store or run into them at the Little League game Tuesday afternoon.

Finally, let me just quickly mention that Dickinson’s quirky dashes seem unusually effective in “There’s been a Death.” Each pause seems appropriately longer than a comma, even though it’s doubtful that’s what the poet had in mind.

Maybe I’ll find more cheerful topics soon, but it seemed like a sign to stumble onto E.D.’s poem just after a review of Christopher Smart’s portrait of “the country of the mad.”

There’s been a Death, in the Opposite House by Emily Dickinson : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.


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