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Recent poet laureate Billy Collins has achieved an enduring legacy not only as a poet but also as a rib-tickling performer of readings and You Tube videos. His numerous collections of poetry, include Ballistics (2008), She Was Just Seventeen (2006), The Trouble with Poetry (2005); Nine Horses (2002); Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems (2001); Picnic, Lightning (1998); The Art of Drowning (1995), which was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Questions About Angels (1991), which was selected by Edward Hirsch for the National Poetry Series; The Apple That Astonished Paris (1988); Video Poems (1980); and Pokerface (1977).

Born in New York City in 1941, he celebrated his sixtieth year as U.S. Poet Laureate. Collins's other awards include fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 1992, at the invitation of the New York Public Library, he served as "Literary Lion. He has conducted summer poetry workshops in Ireland at University College Galway, and taught at Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence, and Lehman College, City University of New York.

I twice attended readings he gave on the west coast in 2001 and still remember the delicious wit and captivating intelligence. Far more than a light verse poet, Collins is an ironist who holds up a subtly distorted mirror so readers or listeners can see themselves in new ways. One poem I find unforgettable is titled Forgetfulness.

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of . . . .

He published that one at age 50, an age when I first began buying books and renting videos that I later realized I had already seen or read. But there is no problem with long-term memory. In Nostalgia he writes:

Where has the summer of 1572 gone? Brocade and sonnet
marathons were the rage. We used to dress up in the flags
of rival baronies and conquer one another in cold rooms of stone.

And in First Reader he recalls:

I can see them standing politely on the wide pages
that I was still learning to turn,
Jane in a blue jumper, Dick with his crayon-brown hair,
with a ball or exploring the cosmos
of the back yard, unaware they are the first characters,
the boy and girl who begin fiction.

Speaking as he did a bit ago about sonnets, he has this to say about the form:

Sonnet

All we need is fourteen

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