Wearing
a black suit and an orange shirt (Halloween was the night before), he looks
around the room. “A poetry traffic jam is something I haven’t seen too often,”
he sa7s. “This is wonderful.”
“He”
is Billy Collins, two-time poet laureate of the United States. I tell my wife
he’s one of the three poets in the United States who makes a living from
poetry.
“Who
are the other two?” she asks.
“I
can’t remember their names offhand,” I reply.
We
are sitting in the main room of the St. Louis Country Library in Frontenac,
Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. Billy Collins is giving a poetry reading from
his new work, Aimless
Love: New and Selected Poems.
More
than 800 people are in the room. My wife and I have what is a “package ticket” –
two admission tickets and a copy of the book for $20. The volume retails for
$16 for the paperback (just over $12 on Amazon), so the package ticket is a
good deal.
To
continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak
Poetry.
1 comment:
What a coincidence, Glynn. I also wrote a post celebrating Collins, just a few weeks ago, at Good Letters. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/goodletters/2014/10/billy-collinss-art-of-drowning/#more-7043
Or maybe it's not a coincidence; maybe, as more & more folks hear Collins read, they delight afresh in what poetry can do.
--Peggy Rosenthal
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