A History of Platitudes: a survey of "A History of Weather" by Billy Collins

Like Joe Pera talking you back to sleep, but you cannot fall back to sleep and the witticisms are not that witty.

In a video published by National Public Radio (NPR), Billy Collins was asked “How to Write Poetry”. Collins gave the answer that to write poetry, someone must read for 10,000 hours, mainly the classics like Wordsworth or Milton, as to internalize the way that English verse sounds. Collins later remarks it’s worthwhile to read the Classics to also attune oneself to history. After reading Collins’ “A History of Weather”, I found myself asking whose history does the poem’s speaker address. Often times the poem conflates historical events and contrives a reimagining of the cliched the winds of change.

the "jackasses" he [Collins] is referring to are the instapoets

- a comment on YouTube

Since today we’re reading “A History of Weather” I want to lay some quick groundwork from Lawrence Buell’s 1996 seminal work on eco-writing The Environmental Imagination.

Since the poem utilizes weather and environment as its main subject, and the poem’s closing line brings the first recognizably human character into the mix with his jacket bunched into a pillow, an open book on his chest, it seems correct to assume that this figure relaxing on the couch may very well have been reading a history book before he fell asleep. Now he’s got weather on his mind. Always a good topic for small-talk.

Lawrence Buell prescribes that eco-writing should follow four main characteristics:

1. The nonhuman environment is present not merely as a framing device

   but as a presence that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in

   natural history.

2. The human interest is not understood to be the only legitimate interest.

3. Human accountability to the environment is part of the text’s ethical

   orientation.

4. Some sense of the environment as a process rather than as a constant

   or a given is at least implicit in the text.

Given the closing line and that the poem writes a history of weather. I would argue that the poem fails the second category; in fact the human interest towards weather is the only interest of the speaker. The weather is defined oppositionally by these historic events or eras.

Here’s the third stanza where the speaker begins to do a bang-up job of describing the weather like he’s sitting in front of his computer screen browsing r/megalophobia and eating bowls of ramen:

     The snow flurries of Victorian London will be surveyed
     along with the gales that blew off Renaissance caps.
     The tornadoes of the Middle Ages will be explicated
     and the long, overcast days of the Dark Ages.
     There will be a section on the frozen nights of antiquity
     and on the heat that shimmered in the deserts of the Bible.

Poetry often times receives criticism that it lacks punctuation. The line and the long, overcast days of the Dark Ages does not impart a complete thought. At this point it’s just an utterance. The speaker is just trying to name-drop his friend the Dark Ages to make himself look cooler at a party full of historians. He’s the blonde guy with a ponytail in Good Will Hunting. I get structurally that the poem ends most lines on a downbeat like the speaker just dropped some witty knowledge, and they’re waiting for the laugh track, but most of the time any witty observations or anecdotes fall incomplete.

Structurally the last line gives us another note of parallel name-dropping. This time the Bible, where readers are given the most in-depth historicizing of biblical narrative, which in itself is problematic as it reinforces canonical representations of history and socio-economic conditions without fully attaching any ethical importance.

i.e. it’s like Steven Spielberg going out to record indigenous groups chanting. The recordings were later used in the movie Close Encounters with the Third Kind.

attempts to put my poems to music have had disastrous results

- Billy Collins

Much of “A History of Weather” is observational, if we can call it that. The first stanza establishes nature’s prominence in the poem:

     It is the kind of spring morning -- candid sunlight
     elucidating the air, a flower-ruffling breeze --
     that makes me want to begin a history of weather,
     a ten-volume elegy for the atmospheres of the past,
     the envelopes that have moved around the moving globe.

Circling back to the poem’s first stanza, I find that the poem has a hard time constructing anything other than pleasantries between neighbors. Circling back to Buell’s criteria, this stanza does not satisfy the needs of more than a framing device. Especially given that natural history here is implicated in human history. That nature is only as important as each intellectual era.

The only thing the reader really gets is an elegy for nature’ death, further reinforced in the second stanza with the lines:

     to illustrate the rain that fell on battlefields
     and the winds that attended beheadings, coronations.

The poem’s logic later fails in the last stanza when the speaker muses about the unseen clouds drifting over an unpeople world. Which in reflection perhaps it could be the typical Collins’ twist at the end, but the way the last two lines are structured can be read that the man on the couch is in some way the one on the unpopulated planet staring up at the sky:

     at the passing of enormous faces and animal shapes,
     his jacket bunched into a pillow, an open book on his chest.

Billy Collins work is full of twists and epiphanies that make the poem work,

- a comment on Reddit

The speaker conflates nature with historical events in a weak read or reimagining of the winds of change, as saying like the winds that blew off the Renaissance caps we’re all reverting back to someone unknown thing before we knew we were just an ape on the couch reading history books.

Reflecting on the role of nature in this text, the third category is surprisingly unsatisfied as well. Turning back to the man asleep on the couch displaying his ethical position towards nature. As gauche as it is to conflate the speaker and author, Collins’ position is poetry on billboards, cereal boxes, and other ad campaigns under the idea of capital markets and ad campaigns first. A poetry co-opted by the ad-copywriter’s pen.

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An attempt to find good takeaways from this poem.

The poem gives a good survey of historical epochs, very similar to ones taught in middle school social studies class. The poem might give a good sense of the show rather than tell trap. The poem tends to tell us.

The poem feels like a sketch or some maligned ad campaign. As Poet Laureate of the United States, Collins had a couple of his works animated. The poem could be a good accompaniment for more graphic work, where the graphics are doing most of the carrying.

Even though it’s contrived, the line … moved around the moving globe gives some internal rhyme. Do better in your poems.

Earlier mentioned the parallel structure in the third stanza. Parallel structure highlighted here:

and the long, overcast days of the Dark Ages.
There will be a section on the frozen nights of antiquity
and on the heat that shimmered in the deserts of the Bible.

Write a poem that utilizes parallel structure or repeats phrases at the start of lines, then change the phrase to subvert the reader’s expectations.

That’s all that I really got. Enjoy Collins, but find a better book recommended below.

For further reading, Timothy Donnelly’s The Cloud Corporation came to mind as I read Billy Collins’ poem. Do yourself a favor, go to the library, and find a better book.

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