Billy Collins

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William A. ("Billy") Collins (born March 22, 1941 in New York City ) is an American writer. He lives in New York City.

Billy Collins in 2008

education and profession

Collins was born in 1941 to parents William and Katherine Collins. He graduated from the College of the Holy Cross and the University of California, Riverside. Later, he was Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York , where he taught from 1968 to 2001. Most recently, he has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, where he was also a visiting author.

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Billy Collins' poetry seems lighter than that of other lyricists, as his poems are written in a skeptical but humorous tone. Collins uses catchy language to draw the reader into his poetic world. Most of his poems begin with a calm restlessness. He discovers life from the sidelines, himself and his readers. He strolls through the apparently familiar with amusement in order to gain gems from everyday materials. His strengths: the wit, the sensibility of seeing, the clarity, the urge of the researcher to discover mysteries.

His breakthrough among the general public came in the early 1990s. A poem appeared in the important poetry yearbook "The Best American Poetry" as early as 1992, but Billy Collins' popularity was limited to the poetry scene.

Four volumes of poetry were available at the time in which the poetics of Collins could already be read. His manuscript for the volume "Questions About Angels" was selected to appear as a book in the renowned National Poetry Series. Garrison Keillor , a radio host, asked Billy Collins to read his poetry on his Prairie Home Companion show. Collins became popular.

In 2000 two publishers fought over Collins - an extraordinary incident in poetry. The New York Times reported the dispute on page one. In June 2001 he was elected US Poet Laureate and thus held the highest office for poetry that his homeland has to award for two years. He is on a par with poets like Mark Strand , Joseph Brodsky , Rita Dove and Robert Hass .

Collins is at the center of the movement seeking to rekindle interest in poetry. On September 6, 2002, he recited his poem "The Names" at an extraordinary session of Congress held in memory of the victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks. As a "Poet Laureate", Collins published a collection of 180 poems (one for each day of a typical school year) under the title "Poetry 180". The first poem, "Introduction to Poetry", encourages one to enjoy the poetry rather than just interpreting it and thus "tying the poem to a chair with a rope / and torturing a confession from it."

Although Collins' poetry is often compared to that of Robert Frost , his work is more likely to be characterized by a rejection of formal lyrical principles. For example, his poem “Sonnet” begins as follows: “All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now” and continues in this way; his “ sonnet ” has fourteen verses, but it does not rhyme and apart from the last verse there is also no iambic five-key . With his mock poem "Paradelle for Susan" he invented the poetic form of the paradelle as a parody of the Villanelle ; the Paradelle is symbolic of his rejection of formal poetry.

Awards

Collins has received numerous awards from Poetry magazine. In 1994 he was voted “Poet of the Year” by this magazine. He was also a fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts , the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

For two years, from 2001 to 2003, Billy Collins was the Acting Poet Laureate in the United States. In his home state he was honored as the "Literary Lion" of the New York Public Library and in 2004 was selected as New York State Poet.

In 1997 he took up a collection of thirty-three of his poems under the title "The Best Cigarette". The CD became a bestseller. In 2005 the CD was re-released under a Creative Commons license, which allows free, non-commercial distribution of the recording. Collins also recorded two of his poems for the audio version of Garrison Keillor's collection "Good Poems" (2002).

In 2016 he was accepted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

Voices about the work

Entertainment Weekly: "A Jerry Seinfeld of Lyric."

John Updike: “Billy Collins writes lovely poetry. .. Clear, gallant and always amazing. More seriously than they seem at first glance, they describe all those worlds that are and were and a few more. "

Richard Alleva: “The most important thing that can be said about Collins is that he ascribes little importance to himself as a poet, and to a rebellious degree, he is a poet who would reject a more prominent status even if it were forced upon him would."

bibliography

Volumes of poetry

Anthologies

German-language editions

  • Shoveling snow with Buddha (from the American by Ron Winkler , Edition Erata, Leipzig 2006)

literature

  • Michael D. Sharp: Some inspirations behind Collins's work . In: Ders .: Popular Contemporary Writers . Marshall Cavendish, New York 2005, p. 460.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Miguel Murphy: Portrait of Billy Collins. In: MiPOesias Magazine December 2007, p. 31.
  2. ↑ http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/poems/july-dec02/collins_9-6.html
  3. ↑ http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/
  4. ↑ Academy Members. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed January 11, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Collins, Billy
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Collins, William A.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH March 22, 1941
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City