OK.
It is a daunting task introducing Billy Collins
because he's introduced day in, day out, all over the country,
all of the time.
What can be said that hasn't been already
said 100 times over?
His distinguished prizes and award-winning publications
are at the tips of your fingers in a bio
on the back of your books.
I know you've bought many already for signing.
So to help me introduce Billy, and hope all those poets
with whom he seems in his poems to be in conversation.
In 1797, Samuel Taylor Coleridge projecting 200 years
into the future writes, "My friend struck with deep joy
may stand, as I have stood, silent with swimming sense.
Yea, gazing round on the wide landscape,
gaze till all doth seem less gross
than bodily, and of such hues as veil the Almighty spirit."
Emily Dickinson, in 1862, predicts Billy Collins
as she writes--
[LAUGHTER]
"He fumbles at your soul as players at the keys
before they drop full music on, he stuns you by degrees."
[APPLAUSE]
In 2005, Jerry Brown emphatically queries
and implores, "Something keeps you up at night,
something must, what isn't?
What is it keeps you up at night?
Let no one persuade you you do not exist."
And in 2008, the year of "Ballistics," Collins himself,
I suspect, would introduce us not to Billy, but to Snowflake,
an albino gorilla, the inhabitant of a park
where the Citadel of Bourbons once stood.
It is the Snowflake who keeps the [? poet ?] up
at night, pallid flame kept alive in a cage of a poem.
Billy Collins may or may not be Snowflake,
but one thing is for sure, he is the sort
of being of which no two are exactly alike.
Today, in 2009, join me to welcome Billy Collins.
[APPLAUSE]