Billy Collins

“Read. Just Read,” advises Billy Collins. “The best teachers are not lecturing behind some seminar table, but are instead sitting quietly on the bookshelves of your home.”

- By Nathan Erwin. Photograph by Suzannah Gilman Collins

Collins is a former Distinguished Professor at Lehman College and the author of 12 books of poetry, including Aimless Love, Sailing Alone Around the Room, and The Rain in Portugal. He explains, “I’m not writing of some vague interiority, not my autobiography or about my feelings. I think each poem must be different from all the others. Therefore, I’m a poet of subject matter.” In his newest collection, Whale Day, the poet includes poems about spiders, Arizona, funerals, and how to eat a banana. “I find joy in the variety of things to write about.”

Despite 16 years of a Catholic education, Billy Collins leans towards agnosticism. He finds time for daily rituals of awareness. “It’s not a full-time job writing a poem,” Collins explains, “and when I finish, I’m not a poet anymore. I walk in the world with my eyes open, like Flannery O’Connor once said, ‘Never be ashamed of staring. There’s nothing that doesn’t require our attention.’” Collins’ awareness is not searing, but peripheral, not striving to get something. He notes, “If you ever want to have a spiritual sense of yourself, stop doing things. You are not distracted from doing things, it’s the doing that’s the distraction!”