Billy Collins
I was born on March 22, 1941 in New York City. I recieved my bachelor's degree in 1963 from College of the Holy Cross and then attended the University of California and recieved a doctorate degree. I am now a professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York. I was the U.S. Poet Laureate from 2001-2003 and then named New York State Poet Laureate from 2004-2006.
Books I've written:
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)
Qestions About Angels (1991)
The Apple that Astonished Paris (1988)
My Friends:
Jack Kerouac
Allen Ginsberg
Gregory Gorso
Thom Gunn
Ted Hughes
Philip Larkin
Chales Tomlinson
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Sources Cited:
"Billy Collins." Poets.org. Academy of American Poets
25 Oct. 2007
<http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/278>
Van de Kamp, Alexandra. "Felicitous Spaces." Terra Incognita
Jan. 2001. 26 Oct. 2007
<www.terraincognia.50megs.com.interview.html>
Picture: http://duckhenge.uoregon.edu/io/images/cache/750
Poem: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/madmen/
Recordings:
I ask You
Numerous Recordings
Madmen
by Billy Collins
They say you can jinx a poem
if you talk about it before it is done.
If you let it out too early, they warn,
your poem will fly away,
and this time they are absolutely right.
Take the night I mentioned to you
I wanted to write about the madmen,
as the newspapers so blithely call them,
who attack art, not in reviews,
but with breadknives and hammers
in the quiet museums of Prague and Amsterdam.
Actually, they are the real artists,
you said, spinning the ice in your glass.
The screwdriver is their brush.
The real vandals are the restorers,
you went on, slowly turning me upside-down,
the ones in the white doctor's smocks
who close the wound in the landscape,
and thus ruin the true art of the mad.
I watched my poem fly down to the front
of the bar and hover there
until the next customer walked in—
then I watched it fly out the open door into the night
and sail away, I could only imagine,
over the dark tenements of the city.
All I had wished to say
was that art was also short,
as a razor can teach with a slash or two,
that it only seems long compared to life,
but that night, I drove home alone
with nothing swinging in the cage of my heart
except the faint hope that I might
catch a glimpse of the thing
in the fan of my headlights,
maybe perched on a road sign or a street lamp,
poor unwritten bird, its wings folded,
staring down at me with tiny illuminated eyes.
Ellyse's Interpretation:
I think this poem is about a lost idea for a poem. In the
beginning he was going to write about the people who
destroy art and how they were insane to do such a thing.
His friend says that the people who destroy art are not insane
and the vandalism is just how they see the art. He also talks about
how his idea was like a caged bird and when his friend shared his
point of view on the idea, the caged bird flew away into the night.
I think that one of the meanings of this poem is that a discussion
or debate will make you question your true beliefs as Collins' caged bird
flew from his heart to the dark tenements of the city. Another point
that was made in this poem was, what is art? Is it in the eye of the beholder,
the mind of the creator, or the mind of the vandal?
This page was created by Ellyse
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