Billy Collins

About:

This workshop will discuss the work of its participants with an emphasis on how the poem develops through certain stages, working through itself to an unforeseeable but satisfying ending. We will look at the poem as having a rhetorical structure and discuss ways to imaginative guide the poem in interesting, even eye-opening directions. Workshop will meet for 3 hours, 3 days.

Requirements:

Applicants must submit 3 poems (email is fine) at the time of registration. Once we have received your submission, we will let you know whether or not you have been accepted into the workshop as soon as possible. Please understand that registration does not guarantee acceptance into the workshop. In the event you are not accepted into the workshop, your deposit will be refunded in full.

Biography:

Billy Collins is an American phenomenon. No poet since Robert Frost has managed to combine high critical acclaim with such broad popular appeal. His work has appeared in a variety of periodicals including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The American Scholar, he is a Guggenheim fellow and a New York Public Library “Literary Lion.” His last three collections of poems have broken sales records for poetry. His readings are usually SRO, and his audience enlarged tremendously by his appearances on National Public Radio includes people of all backgrounds and age groups. The poems themselves best explain this phenomenon. The typical Collins poem opens on a clear and hospitable note but soon takes an unexpected turn; poems that begin in irony may end in a moment of lyric surprise. No wonder Collins sees his poetry as “a form of travel writing” and considers humor “a door into the serious.” It is a door that many thousands of readers have opened with amazement and delight.

Billy Collins has published eight collections of poetry, including Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning, Picnic, Lightning, Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes, Sailing Alone Around the Room: New & Selected Poems, Nine Horses, and The Trouble With Poetry and Other Poems. A collection of his haiku, titled She Was Just Seventeen, was published by Modern Haiku Press in fall 2006. He also edited two anthologies of contemporary poetry: Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry and 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, and was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2006.

Included among the honors Billy Collins has received are fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has also been awarded the Oscar Blumenthal Prize, the Bess Hokin Prize, the Frederick Bock Prize, and the Levinson Prize all awarded by Poetry magazine. In October 2004, Collins was selected as the inaugural recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Mark Twain Award for humorous poetry.

In June 2001, Billy Collins was appointed United States Poet Laureate. In January 2004, Collins was named New York State Poet Laureate. Billy Collins is a professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York. We are most pleased to have Billy return again and again to the Key West Literary Seminar.