Man in Space Poem by Billy Collins

°°°Doesn't Collins know that poetry is not supposed to scold? Poetry does not say, Don't be bad! Only a bad poem does that.°°° - I find this assertion to be hilarious, but it does lend itself towards helping to explain why there's so much bad poetry published on this site. Too many people here think poetry is an avenue of self-help therapy and write sermons full of platitudes and generalities that can often be summed up as some elaborate rhetorical statement of Don't be bad! But in relation to the Billy Collins's poem here, I think you underestimate all that he doesn't here. Your interpretation is one, and as valid as any other, because what the poem says is pretty trite and cliche. And what it doesn't say is wholly conjecture. Never-the-less, it's interesting to look at the poem's construction. The first stanza is definitely an indictment. I don't know how true it is or how often it happens if it is true, but I don't think the depiction of an observed event is the point of his argument here. It is quite clearly to set up a conflict between man and woman, husband and wife, or probably men and women in general as we are led to extrapolate from the concrete to the abstract. The scenario, as I read it, revolves around the third line, and notice how intent he is on making his point. As if intent is something concrete and observable. It's not. But Billy has a point to make, and he's intent on making it. This is what men do, is what he seems to want to imply here. All men, everywhere. Even the men who produce movies based on the scripts that men write. In the second stanza he cleverly breaks the term science fiction into its component parts by placing them on separate lines. He wants to lead with science, with observable, concrete fact, and then make the switch to fiction and using a story to tell a tale and make a point. Nobody has a world of their own. Most assuredly women do not. Not in the observable, physical space we inhabit. But if a writer, presumably male, creates a fictional world solely inhabited by women, well, isn't that still a man's world since he created it? When we reach the third stanza, having arrived by the facility of rocket science (a male domain) , what is encountered? Is this meant to be part of the fiction, or something concrete and observable? The scene has more of the simple physicality of the opening stanza than of the speculative musings of the second. He's cast the women there as autonomous and real. But what's implied, unsaid is that they are there fulfilling there roles according to the point the man is intent on making. There's an infuriating circularity that makes this poem work, but because of anything that's overtly written there. It's all in what's unsaid. Just as it never really says, Don't be bad! - but you found that message there anyway. If only more of the writers on this site could be less explicit about what they're intent on pointing out in their poems, maybe more of them would be worth the time it takes to read them and to think through the implications.

for LANTZ PIERRE: What is hilarious about my remark that poetry is not supposed to scold? Is what i said true of not? I think you spend far too much time trying to analyze a poem that has nothing to offer anyone interested in the truth about the human condition.