192 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
Billy Collins (1941– )
The only child of William Collins, an electrician and later an insurance broker, and
Katherine Collins, a nurse, Billy Collins was born in New York City on 22 March
- Although he was named after his father, he never goes by William—a habit
that mirrors the informality of his poems and the familiarity of his subject mat-
ter. His poems feature such commonplace activities as eating cereal for breakfast,
listening to music (most often jazz), and walking in the park. They usually start
with an observation about the world and are written in the first-person singular,
in unrhymed everyday language, and in a rhythm that matches normal speech pat-
terns. Even when his descriptions verge on the metaphysical, they do so in a way
that brings the subject down to earth: in Collins’s vision, angels deliver mail and
Buddha shovels snow. In “The Flight of the Reader” he muses on the appeal of
his poems: they do not “pester you / with the invisible gnats of meaning”; instead,
they settle on concrete images and the matter-of-factness of everyday life—much
like the poetry of William Carlos Williams, who, Collins likes to point out, was a
pediatrician at the New York City hospital where he was born.
Collins attended Catholic schools through college, receiving a B.A. from
the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D.
from the University of California at Riverside, where he wrote a dissertation on
the Romantic poets. In 1971 he began teaching at Lehman College of the City
University of New York, where he is today distinguished professor of English.
Collins began publishing poetry in small magazines in the 1970s and cofounded
the Mid-Atlantic Review with Michael Shannon in 1975; he remained relatively
unknown, however, until the poet Edward Hirsch chose his Questions about Angels
(1991) as the winner of the National Poetry Series competition. After Garrison
Keillor read selections from Collins’s Picnic, Lightning (1997) on National Public
Radio and invited him to appear on Keillor’s show, A Prairie Home Companion, sales
of his books and requests for readings increased. Bruce Weber calls Collins “the
most popular poet in America”; his enormous appeal is credited to his entertaining
public readings and the ease of understanding his work. This appeal has garnered
Collins not only popularity but also financial rewards: in what Weber describes as
“an expression of confidence virtually unheard of in commercial publishing for a
serious poet,” Random House paid him six-figure sums for Sailing Alone around the
Room: New and Selected Poems (2001), Nine Horses: Poems (2002), and The Trouble
with Poetry and Other Poems (2005).
Plain language and straightforwardness make Collins’s poetry highly acces-
sible—a word often used to describe his work. “I try very assiduously to court the
reader and engage him,” Collins has said. “I am interested more in a public follow-
ing than a critical one.” The accessibility can also be ascribed to his propensity for
humor. In “Care and Feeding” the speaker says that he “will turn 420 in dog years”
and imagines taking himself out for “a long walk.” In “Introduction to Poetry” Col-
lins pokes fun at his students’ attempts at literary interpretation, which he likens
to “torture”: “beating [a poem] with a hose / to find out what it really means.” But
Collins told Elizabeth Farnsworth that “humor... is really a gate of departure.
It’s a way of enticing a reader into a poem so that less funny things can take place