Jack DoyleErin Morris Brad Fortunato

BILLY COLLINS

“The Most Popular Poet in America”

Background

Born- New York City on March 22, 1941

Son of William and Katherine William- electrician Katherine- nurse

Background

college of Holy Cross university of California Awarded

Background

normal life as a professor at Lehman university of the City University of New York.

Appointed as poet laureate

influences

Everyday life

No TimeBy Billy CollinsIn a rush this weekday morning, I tap the horn as I speed past the cemetery where my parents are buried side by side beneath a slab of smooth granite.

Then, all day, I think of him rising up to give me that look of knowing disapproval while my mother calmly tells him to lie back down.

influences

Suburban, middle class other poets Others poems The New Poetry book nature

influences-other poets

Memorizing “The Sun Rising” by John DonneBY BILLY COLLINS Every reader loves the way he tells off the sun, shouting busy old fool into the English skies even though they were likely cloudy on that seventeenth-century morning.

And it’s a pleasure to spend this sunny day

But after a few steps into stanza number two,wherein the sun is blinded by his mistress’s eyes, I can feel the first one begin

to fade like sky-written letters on a windy day.

And by the time I have taken in the third, the second is likewise gone, a blown-out candle now,a wavering line of acrid smoke.

So it’s not until I leave the houseand walk three times around this hidden lakethat the poem begins to showany interest in walking by my side.

Then, after my circling,

better than the courteous dominion of her being all states and him all princes,

better than love’s power to shrinkthe wide world to the size of a bedchamber,

and better even than the compressionof all that into the rooms of these three stanzasis how, after hours stepping up and down the poem,testing the plank of every line,it goes with me now, contracted into a little spot within.

influences

his life isn’t very exciting. poems as an escape. uses humor, transport himself Aristotle

Today by Billy Collins

If ever there were a spring day so perfect,so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze

that it made you want to throwopen all the windows in the house

and unlatch the door to the canary's cage,indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,

a day when the cool brick pathsand the garden bursting with peonies

seemed so etched in sunlightthat you felt like taking

a hammer to the glass paperweighton the living room end table,

releasing the inhabitantsfrom their snow-covered cottage

so they could walk out,holding hands and squinting

into this larger dome of blue and white,well, today is just that kind of day.

Literary Criticism-Positive “uses humor to lead the reader into

the place, often a serious and surprising place”

“Collins often uses an abstract title which he subsequently explores in a variety of concrete images”

John Taylor Says “His humor often seems simply a means, a invitation to serious reflection”

“some examples of playful imagination”

Literary Criticism-negative “seems to have been written in code” “Collins technique produces poems that

evoke no emotional response from the reader”

“He makes readers believe that the only way to approach a poem is to ‘tie it to a chair with a rope and torture a confession out of it’”

“We seem to always know where we are in a Billy Collins poem, but not where he is going”

Herby Billy Collins Billy Collins There is no noisier place than the suburbs, someone once said to me as we were walking along a fairway, and every day is delighted to offer fresh evidence:

the chainsaw, the leaf-blower blowing one leaf around an enormous house with columns, on Mondays and Thursdays the garbage truck equipped with air brakes, reverse beeper, and merciless grinder.

There’s dogs, hammers, backhoes or serious earthmovers if today is not your day. How can the birds get a peep or a chirp in edgewise, I would like to know?

But this morning is different, only a soft clicking sound and the low talk of two workmen working on the house next door, laying tile I am guessing.

Otherwise, all quiet for a change, just the clicking of tiles being handled and their talking back and forth in Spanish then one of them asking in English

“What was her name?” and the silence of the other.

Thank You for listening

Billy Collins has made and continues to make numerous contributions to modern poetry