Introducing Billy Collins

Billy Collins
(1941--)

At last!  A poet who is still alive!

Billy Collins grew up in NYC.  He became a professor of English as a college in the Bronx, and was named Poet Laureate of the USA in 2001, a position he held until 2003.  He was the Poet Laureate of New York State from 2004 to 2006.  He's read poetry at official functions at the White House three times, and he went to Russia in 2014 as a "cultural emissary."  He's won lots of prizes for his poetry.  He's been married twice.

His poetry reminds me a lot of Carl Sandburg's and Robert Frost's -- very conversational, focused on small parts of ordinary life, lots of snapshot-like poems.  If this intro post seems really short, maybe that's because Billy Collins has lived the kind of fairly ordinary life that his poems talk about!