[APPLAUSE]
You're rabid.
I've had my shots.
[LAUGHTER]
I think this part will go better if you close your eyes.
All of you.
Close your eyes and imagine you are on a subway in New York.
It's very late at night.
A man weaves his way down the aisle
and stops in front of you.
He's obviously been celebrating and is on his way home.
He spots a poem displayed on a poster frame above your head.
And to this carload of captive passengers, he begins to read.
"The fox you lug over your shoulder in a dark sack
has cut a hole with a knife and escaped.
The sudden lightness makes you think
you are stronger as you walk back to your small cottage
through a forest that covers the world."
That man on that subway car was Galway Kinnell.
And the poem displayed on that subway
was "Hunger" by Billy Collins.
Not since Robert Frost has a poet
managed to receive so much critical acclaim and at
the same time become so popular.
And of the two, Frost and Collins,
I can tell you Billy has the better disposition.
[LAUGHTER]
Billy lives in New York, where he
is a professor of English at Lehman College
and a visiting writer at Columbia.
For those of you who have never seen Billy,
he's older than his name implies.
His father's name was Bill, and William was already
taken by the pre-romantic poet, William Collins.
So the name Billy stuck.
He admits that keeping the name worked in his favor,
explaining, "When I started sending poems out,
people thought I was 11 years old.
[LAUGHTER]
A child prodigy.
And that this was pretty good stuff.
They published me for that reason."
Yeah, sure.
He has seven collections of poetry,
and their titles give you some idea of how his mind works.
For instance, The Art of Drowning, Taking Off
Emily Dickinson's Clothes.
And this fall, Random House will be releasing
Sailing Alone Around the Room.
Billy's poems have been anthologized and published
in periodicals such as The American Scholar, Poetry,
The New Yorker, Paris Review.
His work has been featured in the Year's Best American Poetry
four times, including 2000.
He is a Guggenheim fellow and a New York Public Library
literary lion--
not the two outside.
Wise and funny at the same time, his poetry
is astonishing, heartbreaking, and brilliant.
Praise for Billy is easy to find and comes from every quarter.
Edward Hirsch in his book How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love
with Poetry, writes, "Billy Collins
is an American original.
A metaphysical poet with a funny bone and a sly,
questioning intelligence.
His poems bump up against the deepest human mysteries."
And Jared Smith, writing in the Irish Times said,
"The weight of the world in his poems
is carried by a playful humor, reminiscent of Elizabeth
Bishop and a vigor that recalls Robert Duncan."
The first time I saw Billy Collins,
he was eating corn flakes in a campus cafeteria.
With a promise I made to wash the blackboards
and organize the field trips, I fast-talked my way
into a nonexistent job as his assistant
for a workshop he was conducting in Galway.
Ireland considers him a native son.
In fact, his photograph hangs in the famous Kennys Bookshop
between James Joyce and Seamus Heaney.
I once asked Billy what would he have
done if he'd not been a poet.
And his immediate answer was a jazz musician.
But a jazz man he already is, with his rich improvisations
and unexpected riffs on subjects ranging from Aristotle
to Irish cows, three blind mice to shoveling snow with Buddha.
Annie Proulx said it.
"I am fiercely glad that Billy Collins is ours."
And would you welcome, please, Mr. Billy Collins.
[APPLAUSE]