Billy Collins

1. “The Most Popular Poet in America” Jack Doyle Erin Morris Brad Fortunato Billy Collins

2. Background • Born- New York City on March 22, 1941 • Son of William and Katherine • William- electrician • Katherine- nurse

3. Background • college of Holy Cross • university of California • Awarded

4. Background • normal life as a professor at Lehman university of the City University of New York. • Appointed as poet laureate

5. influences • Suburban, middle class • other poets • Others poems • The New Poetry book • nature

6. influences-other poets Memorizing “The Sun Rising” by John Donne BY 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 house and walk three times around this hidden lake that the poem begins to show any 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 shrink the wide world to the size of a bedchamber, and better even than the compression of all that into the rooms of these three stanzas is 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.

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

8. influences • Everyday life No Time By Billy Collins In 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.

9. Poem- suburbs and nature influence him Her BY 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. “ Canada by Billy Collins “I am writing this on a strip of white birch bark that I cut from a tree with a penknife. There is no other way to express adequately the immensity of the clouds that are passing over the farms    and wooded lakes of Ontario and the endless visibility    that hands you the horizon on a platter.  I am also writing this in a wooden canoe, a point of balance in the middle of Lake Couchiching,    resting the birch bark against my knees.    I can feel the sun’s hands on my bare back,    but I am thinking of winter”

10. 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”

11. 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”

12. Thank You for listening Billy Collins has made and continues to make numerous contributions to modern poetry