A former distinguished professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York, Collins served as New York State poet from 2004 to 2006. He is the author of 12 collections of poetry, including the bestsellers Aimless Love, The Trouble with Poetry, and Sailing Alone Around the Room. He is also the editor of Poetry 180, 180 More, and Bright Wings. Tickets are $26 (same price for one or two attendees) and include a signed copy of Musical Tables to be picked up at the event.īilly Collins is the former poet laureate of the United States. Please visit here to watch from home on December 9. This event is now sold out for in-person seating. Merwin, Kay Ryan, and Charles Simic, and written with Collins’s recognizable wit and wisdom, the poems of Musical Tables show one of our greatest poets channeling his unique voice into a new phase of his exceptional career. Inspired by the small poetry of writers as diverse as William Carlos Williams, W.S. Neither haiku nor limerick, the small poem pushes to an extreme poetry’s famed power to condense emotional and conceptual meaning. Here, Collins writes about his trademark themes of nature, animals, poetry, mortality, absurdity, and love - all in a handful of lines.

Now “America’s favorite poet” ( The Wall Street Journal) has found a new form for his unique poetic style: the small poem. Just as I might have trust in an abstract painter more if I knew he or she could draw a credible chicken, I have faith in poets who can go short.” -Billy Collins “Whenever I pick up a new book of poems, I flip through the pages looking for small ones. Former Poet Laureate Billy Collins returns to the Library with his newest book of poems, Musical Tables.This time, he will be in conversation with Antoinette Brim-Bell, Connecticut's poet laureate.

Sailing alone around the room poem