If you asked me who my favorite contemporary comic poet is, I wouldn’t hesitate a second. It’s Billy Collins, U.S. Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2003. Not that all his poems are comic—but those are the ones I keep returning to, the ones I’ll talk about in this post. Actually, comedy isn’t easy to talk about. But I think it will help if I offer you some of what I see as Collins’s favorite categories of poems.

First, then, are what I call poems made up of what is not. There’s “Litany,” which you can hear Collins read on YouTube. His introduction there, given in his usual deadpan voice, explains that sometimes it’s good to improve on another poet’s poem. So he begins with two clichéd lines from Belgian  poet Jacques Crickillon:

You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.

Then after completing the stanza with two other clichés for what “you are,” he moves into

However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.

And so on—through nineteen more lines of what “you are not.”

Or take “Consolation,” which Collins explains on YouTube was written after the cancellation of a European trip that he and his wife had planned. The poem begins:

How agreeable it is not to be touring Italy this summer,
wandering her cities and ascending her torrid hilltowns.
How much better to cruise these local, familiar streets,
fully grasping the meaning of every roadsign and billboard
and all the sudden hand gestures of my compatriots.

There are no abbeys here, no crumbling frescoes or famous
domes and there is no need to memorize a succession
of kings or tour the dripping corners of a dungeon.
No need to stand around a sarcophagus, see Napoleon’s
little bed on Elba, or view the bones of a saint under glass.

And so on, until the ending:

I will not puzzle over the bill or record in a journal
what I had to eat and how the sun came in the window.
It is enough to climb back into the car

as if it were the great car of English itself
and sounding my loud vernacular horn, speed off
down a road that will never lead to Rome, not even Bologna.

Another category of Collins’s poems that I delight in is where he plays with clichés, as in “Adage.” Here are the closing stanzas:

Let us be clear about something.
Love is not as simple as getting up
on the wrong side of the bed wearing the emperor’s clothes.

No, it’s more like the way the pen
feels after it has defeated the sword.
It’s a little like the penny saved or the nine dropped stiches.

You look at me through the halo of the last candle
and tell me love is an ill wind
that has no turning, a road that blows no good,

But I am here to remind you,
as our shadows tremble on the walls,
that love is the early bird who is better late than never.

Finally, here are some examples of one of Collins’s favorite categories: ars poetica. Take this one with the tongue-in-cheek title “The Great American Poem.” It begins:

If this were a novel,
it would begin with a character,
a man alone on a southbound train
or a young girl on a swing by a farmhouse.

And as the pages turned, you would be told
that it was morning or the dead of night,
and I, the narrator, would describe
for you the miscellaneous clouds over the farmhouse…

—and so on for three stanzas of the imagined plot. Then:

But this is a poem,
and the only characters here are you and I,
alone in an imaginary room
which will disappear after a few more lines,

Leaving us not time to point guns at one another
or toss all our clothes into a roaring fireplace.…

We have something better than all this turbulence
lurching toward some ruinous conclusion.
I mean the sound that we will hear
as soon as I stop writing and put down the pen.

I once heard someone compare it 
to the sound of crickets in a field of wheat
or, more faintly, just the wind
over that field stirring things that we will never see.

(That final line recalling Collins’ category of things that are not.)

Another of his wry ars poetica poems is “The Trouble with Poetry.” Here are the first four of its nine stanzas:

The trouble with poetry, I realized
as I walked along a beach one night—
cold Florida sand under my bare feet,
a show of stars in the sky—

the trouble with poetry is
that it encourages the writing of more poetry,
more guppies crowding the fish tank,
more baby rabbits
hopping out of their mothers into the dewy grass.

And how will it ever end?
unless the day finally arrives
when we have compared everything in the world
to everything else in the world,

and there is nothing left to do
but quietly close our notebooks
and sit with our hands folded on our desks.

But I want to end with Collins’s ars poetica poem “Villanelle,” which is a marvelously fun tour de force: a villanelle about the villanelle form. In this case I have to give you the entire poem, because a villanelle only exists through the interplay of its nineteen lines:

The first line will not go away
though the middle ones will disappear,
and the third, like the first, is bound to get more play.

Examples of this type are written every day,
and whether uplifting or drear,
that first line will just not go away.

It seems some lines have the right of way.
It’s their job to reappear,
for example, the third, designed to get more play.

Whether you squawk like an African Grey
or sing sweetly to the inner ear,
The line you wrote first will just not go away.

You may compose all night and day
under a bare lightbulb or a crystal chandelier,
but line number three must get more play.

How can a poet hope to go wildly astray
or sing out like a romantic gondolier
when the first line will not go away
and the third always has the final say?

With this I rest my case for Billy Collins’s comic genius.

Peggy Rosenthal has a PhD in English Literature. Her first published book was Words and Values, a close reading of popular language. Since then she has published widely on the spirituality of poetry, in periodicals such as America, The Christian Century, and Image, and in books that can be found here.

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