Poet
Billy Collins
American poet · b. 1941
Billy Collins served two terms as US Poet Laureate (2001–2003) and was called, by the New York Times, "the most popular poet in America" — a title his sales figures kept defending. A longtime professor at Lehman College in the Bronx, he created Poetry 180, a program placing a poem a day in American high schools, chosen to be read aloud without explication or quizzes.
His poems begin in the ordinary — a barking dog, a jar of pencils, a forgotten novel — and swerve somewhere stranger, with a stand-up comedian's timing and a metaphysician's aftertaste. Critics who call him merely accessible tend to miss the trapdoors.
His work is under copyright, so we quote only opening gestures and point you to the rest.
Billy Collins's most famous poems
These poems are still in copyright, so we can't reprint them — but here's what makes each one matter, and where to read it.
Introduction to Poetry1988
I ask them to take a poemand hold it up to the light
A teacher pleads with students to experience poems — hold them to the light, press an ear to their hive, waterski across their surface — but the students want only to tie the poem to a chair and 'torture a confession out of it.' It is the most quoted indictment of how schools teach poetry, written by a teacher. Every English department has it pinned somewhere, half in penance.
Read the full poem →Forgetfulness1991
The name of the author is the first to go
Memory loss as gentle comedy: the novel's plot, the state flower, the quadratic equation all pack up and retire 'to a little fishing village' in the brain's southern hemisphere. The laughs accumulate until the poem quietly turns — the moon out the window, something slipping that matters. It is the rare poem about aging that audiences request twice in one reading.
Read the full poem →The Lanyard2005
A man recalls the camp lanyard he gave his mother as a boy — offered, absurdly, as repayment for her thousands of meals, nursed illnesses, and a life of care. The poem's comedy is the impossible exchange rate; its devastation is the boy's certainty that the lanyard 'would be enough.' It has become the contemporary Mother's Day poem, usually read through tears.
Read the full poem →Litany2002
You are the bread and the knife,The crystal goblet and the wine.
Collins borrows two earnest lines from another poet's love poem and then audits the metaphors: yes, you are the bread and the knife, but 'you are not the wind in the orchard,' and — the great turn — the speaker, it emerges, is several of the better things himself. It is a parody of love-poem inflation that somehow ends up romantic anyway. A toddler's viral recitation of it has been watched millions of times.
Read the full poem →On Turning Ten1995
The whole idea of it makes me feellike I'm coming down with something,
A mock-elegy in which a boy mourns the lost grandeur of being four (an Arabian wizard) and seven (a soldier): double digits arrive like a disease. The joke is the disproportion; the truth is that first losses are real losses, however small the sufferer. It ends with skinned knees that now actually bleed — childhood's invincibility officially expired.
Read the full poem →Marginalia1996
A celebration of readers who talk back in the margins — from monks complaining about cold scriptoriums to students dueling with professors in pencil. It builds to one of Collins's most beloved endings: a stranger's note about egg salad stains and being hopelessly in love, found in a used Catcher in the Rye. The poem argues that books are conversations, and the margins are where we confess.
Read the full poem →