Poet Billy Collins is a unique literary figure - a widely read contemporary poet. The former US Poet Laureate and New York State Poet has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation, though his most dramatic honors come from a wide and appreciative readership. Collins's poetry collections, including The Trouble With Poetry and Other Poems, Nine Horses, Sailing Alone Around the Room, and Picnic, Lightening, have broken records for poetry sales. His writing is marked by inventiveness beyond traditional poetry forms with ironic twists and lyrical turns of phrase that resonate powerfully. An advocate for integrating poetry into everyday life, Collins compiled the anthologies Poetry 180 and 180 More with poems for every day of a typical school year. Billy Collins has been a professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York since 1968- City Arts & Lectures
Bio
Billy Collins
Billy Collins is the author of several books of poetry and two anthologies of contemporary poetry, including The Trouble with Poetry: And Other Poems; The Arts of Drowning, which was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall prize; and Questions About Angels, which won the National Poetry Series in 1990. He is also a distinguished professor of English at Lehman College (CUNY). Collins served as US Poet Laureate (2001-2003) and as New York State Poet Laureate (2004-2006). Collins' poetry has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Harper's, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among many other journals and periodicals. He has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has won several awards and prizes.
Work in prose that has some of the technical or literary qualities of poetry (such as regular rhythm, definitely patterned structure, or emotional or imaginative heightening) but that is set on a page as prose. The form took its name from Charles Baudelaire's Little Poems in Prose (1869). Other writers of prose poems include, in the 19th century, Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, Friedrich Hölderlin, Novalis, and Rainer Maria Rilke, and in the 20th, Amy Lowell (in her polyphonic prose) and such contemporary poets as John Ashbery.
I quite enjoy Billy Collins. He has the merit of being readable and engaging, and if some poets make my inner literary critic struggle more, it is not because Collins does not. Rather, he has the tact to allow me the option of engaging him lightly, should I choose. And the wit to warn me not to take him lightly.