A MAJOR MINOR POET: Billy Collins isn't just funny.

Billy Collins being named poet laureate was good news to me, yet I think the first words that ran through my head, after hearing of the appointment, were, "They've actually had the guts to honor someone who writes light verse? Ogden Nash should have been so lucky!"

Like a lot of first reactions, it was wrong. But, like all first reactions, it had its reasons.

Light verse jingles along within neatly hedged stanzas. It's the interplay between the poet's fantasticality and the precise meters and nimble rhymes that produces the humor of, for instance, Hilaire Belloc's description (in "Matilda") of eager-beaver firemen "saving" a Victorian mansion that isn't really burning: "They ran their ladders through a score / Of windows on the ball room floor / And took peculiar pains to souse / The pictures up and down the house."

Billy Collins doesn't brandish rhyme or meter or pattern that way. His poems can make you laugh, but their sound effects are muted and help achieve a dry whimsicality that brings to mind the comedian Bob Newhart or the cartoonist Charles Schultz rather than any other poet. Collins's recent volume of new and collected verse bears the pleasant title, Sailing Alone around the Room (Random House), but The Button-Down Mind of Billy Collins might have been just as apt. Perhaps it's my associating Collins with comic entertainers that made me think of him as a maker of light, comic verse. But there's something else.

I often have occasion to read light verse to children, and I get the same pleasure from reciting these little masterpieces the twentieth time as the first. But I never get more. The peculiar joy and the peculiar drawback of good light verse are that it defies time but it never grows with time. The same is true of most of Collins's poems.

Take "Pinup." The opening,

The murkiness of the local garage is not so dense

that you cannot make out the calendar of pinup

drawings on the wall above a bench of tools.

is typical Collins: a seemingly slouching gait concealing a basically iambic beat; an apparently rhymeless poem that contains the ghost of rhyme ("murkiness" with "dense"); a protagonist addressed in the second person because he could be Everyman (if not Everywoman) but who is actually Billy Collins not shirking the Everyman role.

Our hero flips through a calendar while a mechanic works on his car. Collins captures the coy, unintentionally comic appeal of the pinup girl, Miss March, with a relaxed, unprurient humanity:

One hand is busy keeping her hat down on her head

and the other is grasping the little dog's leash,

so of course there is no hand left to push down

her dress which is billowing up around her waist...

Oh, "of course" the poor dear can't help herself! And it is this gallant excuse-making of the onlooker that becomes the source of the poem's comedy. The hero is being protective not only of Miss March's essential innocence but of his own self-esteem. He refuses to think of himself as the horny creep that all porn, however softcore, tries to turn a man into. He consents to being an admiring observer but not a peeping Tom. And, since he is a Billy Collins hero, the onlooker carries his fantasy of gallantry as far as he can.

You would like to come to her rescue, gather up the little dog in your arms, untangle the leash, lead her to safety, and receive her bottomless gratitude, but

But the mechanic interrupts the reverie to explain that the repair is going to take longer and cost more than expected. Our hero calmly (gladly, we suspect) accepts the verdict and sidles back to the calendar. He may be gallant but he's also hooked. What does Miss April look like?

This is excellent comedy and good poetry. Reading it for the tenth time, I smiled, chuckled, laughed exactly at the parts I smiled, chuckled, laughed during the nine previous readings. Precisely what happens when I reread Nash and Belloc. Precisely what happens when I listen to The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart for the umpteenth time.

There is another connection to Newhart and other standup comedians. When Newhart asks us to imagine a public relations adviser urging Abe Lincoln to keep the Gettysburg Address the way the boys in the back room drafted it, it is the very situation that starts the listener laughing even before the jokes begin. The same goes for many a Collins poem. While most poets of the last hundred years make readers work their way into the meaning of a poem gingerly, Collins charms and entices right from the start with his provocative setups: "A sentence starts out like a lone traveler / heading into a blizzard at night" ("Winter Syntax"); "In the morning when I found History / snoring on the couch..." ("The Lesson"); "Remember the 1340s? / We were doing a dance called the Catapult" ("Nostalgia"); "Trying to protect his students' innocence / he told them the Ice Age was really just/ the Chilly Age, a period of a million years when everyone had to wear sweaters" ("The History Teacher"). Often Collins fulfills the promise of these crowd-pleasing openings, sometimes he doesn't, but he rarely lifts the entire poem to a plane far above the opening. There is much justice in Adam Kirsch's observation (New Republic, October 29, 2001): "the very easiness of the joke suggests its limitation....Once we remind ourselves that the target of the joke is merely an expression, the piling up of new details begins to seem a poor use of Collins's wit."

All this is by way of saying that Billy Collins may be merely (merely!) a good minor poet. But I'm also beginning to believe that the most important thing to say about Collins is that he is a deliberately minor poet, even a rebelliously minor poet, a poet who would reject major status if it were thrust upon him. One is tempted to say that minor-ness is what he strives for rather than what he falls back into for want of greatness.

Nowadays, an American citizen may feel washed up on strange but inevitable beaches by irresistible, Hegelian waves. Who can defy history when your own country is making it? Are we not all cogs in some mysteriously wired machine? Must not a major American poet--like a latter-day Pound or Eliot--have something important to say about the winds of war, the winds of change, and a lot of other portentous winds? Yet how foolish even the best of poets (even a Pound or Eliot? especially a Pound or Eliot!) can sound when he solemnly licks his finger, holds it up in the air, and solemnly prognosticates. At times, one longs, in a time of crisis, for a minor poet who does nothing but explore, thoroughly, entertainingly, and--above all--honestly, the design of his immediate surroundings and familiar fantasies. The same goes for all the arts: Now and then we need a Lewis Carroll instead of a Dostoyevsky, a Borges rather than a Thomas Mann, an Edward Gorey not an Anselm Kiefer. The major artists reach further and deeper into history, but the minor ones find crevices within history where we may shelter, take a breath, and know ourselves again.

At his best, Billy Collins achieves this minor glory. He is the bard of the emotional oasis and the life-restoring whim-wham; he is the perfect antidote to Hegel. In "Bar Time," he notes that "universal / saloon practice" sets the pub clock "fifteen minutes ahead / of all the clocks in the outside world." This allows the clientele to do "our drinking in the unknown future, / immune from the cares of the present, / safely harbored a quarter of an hour / beyond the woes of the contemporary scene." But, lest you think Collins is writing a sort of metered escapism, note well that in the aforementioned "The History Teacher," the misguidedly compassionate teacher, having mistaught his grammar school students that "The War of the Roses took place in a garden, / and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom / on Japan," allows the children out on the playground where they "torment the weak / and the smart, / mussing up their hair and breaking their glasses." Collins doesn't want to escape history; he just doesn't want a consciousness of it to crush awareness of the those private joys that are timeless.

Collins knows that the major turning points within every life are, in a sense, timeless, especially the final crisis, death. In "Tomes," there is a sarcastic evocation of the sort of all-encompassing historical book, typically titled The History of the World, the kind that weighs eleven pounds and that "always has a way of"

...quieting the riotous sort of information that foams around my waist

even though it never mentions

the silent labors of the poor

the daydreams of grocers and tailors,

or the faces of men and women alone in single rooms...

Collins then describes his mother on her deathbed:

the bones of her fingers interlocked,

her sunken eyes staring upward

beyond all knowledge,

beyond the tiny figures of history,

some in uniform, some not,

marching onto the pages of this incredibly heavy book.

If Billy Collins were nothing but an ahistorical jester, jingling the bells on his cap to distract us from the vicissitudes of history, he would be a strange poet laureate indeed for these post-September 11 times. But, though he certainly doesn't spurn the role of jester, he is also more than that. While many men in various kinds of uniform are warning us that they have every right to kill us if we don't march in the historical direction they have decreed correct, Billy Collins's poems remind us that there are places in the mind where the generals and the publicists and the terrorists cannot reach, and that the most stirring of historical admonitions are often a lot less soul-stirring than the faces of men and women alone in single rooms. If a return to normalcy is really the best refutation of terror, then Collins is indeed the poet fit for these tense times, for he is the celebrant of the beauty and comedy that are everywhere around us in everyday life.