比利·柯林斯

William James Collins (born March 22, 1941) is an American poet who served as the Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. He was a distinguished professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York, retiring in 2016. Collins was recognized as a Literary Lion of the New York Public Library (1992) and selected as the New York State Poet for 2004 through 2006. In 2016, Collins was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. As of 2020, he is a teacher in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton.

Early life and education

Collins was born in Manhattan on March 22, 1941. He was raised in Queens and White Plains. His father, William Collins, was of Irish descent, and his mother, Katherine, was from Canada. Katherine worked as a nurse who stopped working to raise the couple's only child. William was a worker on Wall Street who Collins has cited as an inspiration for his humor.

After attending Archbishop Stepinac High School, Collins graduated from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, with a Bachelor of Arts in English literature in 1963. He then earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in romantic poetry from the University of California, Riverside. As a graduate student, Collins studied under poet and Victorian literature scholar Robert Peters. He also came under the influence of contemporary poets such as Karl Shapiro, Howard Nemerov and Reed Whittemore, and during his adolescence he was influenced by Beat Generation poets as well. In 1975, Collins founded The Mid-Atlantic Review with his friends Walter Blanco and Steve Bailey.

Career

Collins was a Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College in the Bronx, where he joined the faculty in 1968. He is a founding Advisory Board member of the CUNY Institute for Irish-American Studies at Lehman College. Collins has taught and served as a visiting writer at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York as well as teaching workshops across the U.S. and in Ireland. Collins is a member of the faculty of SUNY Stony Brook Southampton, where (2015) he teaches poetry workshops.

Collins was named U.S. Poet Laureate in 2001 and held the title until 2003. As Poet Laureate, Collins instituted the program Poetry 180 for high schools. Collins chose 180 poems for the program and the accompanying book, Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry—one for each day of the school year. Collins edited a second anthology, 180 More Extraordinary Poems for Every Day to refresh the supply of available poems. Collins served as Poet Laureate for the State of New York from 2004 until 2006. Collins served a stint with the Winter Park Institute in Winter Park, Florida, an affiliate of Rollins College. In 2012, Collins became Poetry Consultant for Smithsonian Magazine.

During the summer of 2013 Collins guest hosted Garrison Keillor's popular daily radio broadcast, The Writer's Almanac, on NPR. Collins has been invited to read at The White House three times—in 2001, 2011, and 2014. In 2014 he traveled to Russia as a cultural emissary of the U.S. State Department. In 2013 and 2015, Collins toured with the singer-songwriter Aimee Mann, performing on stage with her in a music-poetry-conversation format. Collins and Paul Simon have engaged in four onstage conversations about poetry, music, and lyrics, starting in 2008. The conversations were held in 2008 at New York's 92nd Street Y and The Winter Park Institute, in 2013 at the Chautauqua Institution, and in 2013 at Emory University as part of the Richard Ellman Lectures in Modern Literature, where Simon was the 2013 Richard Ellman Lecturer.

Collins presented a TED talk, Everyday moments, caught in time at TED 2012. Collins, as one of the Favorite 100 TED speakers of all time, was invited to give another TED talk at TED 2014 in Vancouver, Canada.

As U.S. Poet Laureate, Collins read his poem The Names at a special joint session of the United States Congress on September 6, 2002, held to remember the victims of the 9/11 attacks. Though, unlike their British counterparts, U.S. poets laureate are not asked or expected to write occasional poetry, Collins was asked by the Librarian of Congress to write a poem especially for that event. Collins initially refused to read "The Names" in public, though he has read it two times in public since 2002. He vowed not to include it in any of his books, refusing to capitalize on the 9/11 attacks. However, "The Names" was included in The Poets Laureate Anthology put out by the Library of Congress, for which Collins wrote the foreword. At the time the only book-published version of "The Names", it contained a number of typographical errors. The poem also appeared in the New York Times, September 6, 2002. Collins finally agreed to include "The Names" in his new and selected volume Aimless Love in 2013.

In 1997, Collins recorded The Best Cigarette, a collection of 34 of his poems, that would become a bestseller. In 2005, the CD was re-released under a Creative Commons license, allowing free, non-commercial distribution of the recording. He also recorded two of his poems for the audio versions of Garrison Keillor's collection Good Poems (2002). Collins has appeared on Keillor's radio show, A Prairie Home Companion, numerous times, where he gained a portion of his large following. In 2005, Collins recorded Billy Collins Live: A Performance in New York City. Collins was introduced by his friend, actor Bill Murray.Collins has been called "The most popular poet in America" by the New York Times. When he moved from the University of Pittsburgh Press to Random House, the advance he received shocked the poetry world—a six-figure sum for a three-book deal, virtually unheard of in poetry. The deal secured for Collins through his literary agent, Chris Calhoun, then of Sterling Lord Literistic, with the editor Daniel Menaker, remained the talk of the poetry world, and indeed the literary world, for quite some time.