Introduction to Poetry
by Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.



from The Apple that Astonished Paris
Reproduced with permission of the
University of Arkansas Press, 
Fayetteville, Ark.
Copyright 1988 by Billy Collins.
All rights reserved.

About Billy Collins

This year the Literary Festival celebrates poetry and the poetic imagination, so it is fitting that our keynote speaker is Billy Colllins, who has tirelessly invited contemporary readers to poetry, not only through his work, but also through appearances on NPR, PBS, and YouTube(!), and especially through Poetry 180, a website that offers students a way to hear or read a poem on each of the 180 days of the school year.

Mr. Collins' poems are full of humor, clarity, irony, deep emotion, and surprise. His work has been noted for its "accessibility," but, as humorous and hospitable as they are, Billy Collins' poems are neither simple, nor simply funny. John Updike said, "Billy Collins writes lovely poems... Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides." And The New York Times wrote, "Luring his readers into the poem with humor, Mr. Collins leads them unwittingly into deeper, more serious places, a kind of journey from the familiar to quirky to unexpected territory, sometimes tender, often profound."

Billy Collins' most recent collection, published in September 2008, is Ballistics. His other books include The Trouble With Poetry; Nine Horses; Sailing Alone Around the Room; Picnic, Lightning; The Best Cigarette; The Art of Drowning; Questions About Angels; and The Apple that Astonished Paris. His website is The Best Cigarette.

In June 2001, Billy Collins was appointed United States Poet Laureate 2001-2003. In January 2004, he was named New York State Poet Laureate 2004-06. Billy Collins is a professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York. Mr. Collins has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has also been awarded numerous prizes by Poetry magazine. In October 2004, Collins was selected as the inaugural recipient of the Poetry Foundation's Mark Twain Award for humorous poetry.

Please join us on Wednesday, February 11, 2009, at 7 p.m. at Highland Park High School, for an evening with Billy Collins. Admission is free and open to the public. Highland Park High School is located at 4220 Emerson Avenue in Dallas. Click here for directions.