December 3rd: Think Forum - An Evening with Billy Collins in Cleveland

Tuesday 3 December 2024 at 7:30 p.m., see former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins at the Milton and Tamar Maltz Performing Arts Center, 1855 Ansel Rd, Cleveland, OH 44106.

Billy Collins is an American phenomenon. No poet since Robert Frost has combined high critical acclaim with such broad popular appeal. His work has appeared in a variety of periodicals including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The American Scholar. Collins has published twelve collections of poetry that have led to numerous awards including the Mark Twain Award for Humor in Poetry. Collins was named New York State Poet Laureate from 2004 to 2006 after serving as the Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001-2003. Collins’ newest book, Water, Water: Poems, will be released in November 2024.

Book signing immediately following the lecture.

Get your FREE tickets at https://case.edu/maltzcenter/calendar-events/concerts-events-silver-hall/think-forum-evening-billy-collins.

Billy Collins Gives Ya Tips on How Ta Write Poetry!

Yeah, that's right-- Billy Collins!  And he's talkin' to you!
So you oughta listen.

• Dodge Poetry Festival: 5 tips on writing from former poet laureate Billy Collins (Video)

Dozens of poets performed Friday at the Dodge Poetry Festival at Newark's New Jersey Performing Arts Center. Poet Yusef Komunyakaa and the Tomas Doncker Band were featured performers. (Naomi Nix | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)

• Some more tips from the internet

Billy C reads at Kent U, and other Wick-ed Stuff

It's April, and the poetry news is coming fast and furious.
Here's the latest issue of the newsletter from the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State:

Poetry Reading: Billy Collins Former U.S. Poet Laureate, Billy Collins, will visit Kent State as part of the Wick Poetry Center’s annual U.S. Poet Laureate Reading in celebration of National Poetry Month. The event will take place on Thursday, April 18 at 7:30 p.m. in the Ballroom of the Kent Student Center. The U.S. Poet Laureate Series is a collaboration between the Wick Poetry Center and the Kent State University Library with sponsorship from the Honors College, Department of History, and Department of English. Billy Collins, U.S.Poet Laureate (2001-2003), is the author of several books of poetry, including Ballistics; Nine Horses; Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems; The Art of Drowning, which was a finalist for the Lenore Marhall Poetry Prize; Questions About Angels, which was selected for the National Poetry Series; and most recently horoscopes for the dead. Collins’ new and selected collection of poems (2003-2013), Shouting Over the Machinery of Time, will be available March 2013. His poetry has appeared in anthologies, textbooks, and a variety of periodicals, such as Poetry, American Poetry Review, and The New Yorker. Collins has edited Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry, an anthology of contemporary poems for use in schools. Collins’ other honors and awards include fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. The 12th Annual Performance of Giving Voice This year's Giving Voice will take place on Wednesday, May 1, at 6:30 p.m. in the Ballroom of the Kent Student Center. Giving Voice features local students (grades 3-12), senior citizens, veterans, and medical care providers and patients from area hospitals, performing original poetry. All material is created in Wick outreach programs, including workshops led by Kent State University undergraduates enrolled in the service-learning course “Teaching Poetry in the Schools.” Robin Scheuerman, senior Speech-Language Pathology major and Wick intern, is one of the students in the course this spring. When asked about her experience in the class, she was eager to talk about her students: "I have had the wonderful opportunity this semester to teach poetry to 7th graders at Miller South School for the Visual and Performing Arts in Akron, and also to 3rd graders at Walls Elementary School in Kent. The creativity and excitement shown by the students have been inspiring to me in my own writing and life. I am very much looking forward to Giving Voice, when the students will have the opportunity to share their hard work and wonderful poetry with family, friends, and the community."

The Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize Submissions are now open for the first book contest. This prize is offered annually to a poet who has not previously published a full-length collection of poems. Michael Mlekoday was the 2012 winner, chosen by Dorianne Laux, for his manuscript The Dead Eat Everything. The 2013 winner will receive $2,500 and will give a reading at Kent State in 2014 with prize judge, Mark Doty. The deadline for submissions is May 1, 2013. Click here to enter your manuscript to the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize. National Teen Writing Contest To celebrate National Poetry Month, the Wick Poetry Center is hosting a teen writing contest for High School students throughout the nation. The entry fee is $5 per submission. The winning poet and the poet's school will receive $500. The Wick Poetry Center will bring the winning poet & guest to Kent State University in September 2013 to read during our yearly event, Celebrating Our Own. The second place winner and their school will receive $250.  Click here to submit a poem to the contest, which will run from February 15 through April 30, 2013.

Poets William Pitt Root and Pamela Uschuk visit KSU campus By Daniel Dorman, Undergraduate Intern The evening of William Pitt Root and Pamela Uschuk's reading had a pleasantly intimate atmosphere. Felt through their welcoming presence and bolstered by their obvious love and friendship with poet and professor Maj Ragain, the poets settled into the Wick event with ease and comfort. After an inviting and gracious introduction by David Hassler, Maj read an embracing piece about Bill and Pam, the friendship they share, and their poetry. He smoothly entered the audience into the immensity of Bill and Pam's poems. Bill and Pam both showed their appreciation for being welcomed through their excitement and by reading for their dear friend. Before she began to read, Pam said in the spirit of the evening, "Afterwards, let's go roll in the snow together!" As Maj said of the couple: "They meet every day." It seems to me that they meet poetry every day, as well. During dinner the poets decided to change the usual poetry reading scheme. Rather than divide their time in half, the poets took turns reading one or two pieces at a time. The back and forth interactions of the poems and the wide worlds they formed together made for an intriguing and stimulating event. The poets read selections from a number of their titles, including "White Boots," "Reasons for Going It on Foot," "Crazy Love" and "Wild in the Plaza of Memory." The reading drove through the evening a sense of love for poetry, fellow poets and time spent together. Even as the night came to a close, Bill and Pam remained, conversing with students, faculty and poets alike. Want to keep up with news from the Wick?   Sign up for the newsletter or just follow them on Facebook

Writers Make the Big Time on Center Stage

It's so jejune to be a fan of Billy Collins these days, but for those of us who aren't afraid to like a poet just because he's gotten popular, the Writers Center Stage series sponsored by the Cuyahoga County Public Library Foundation and Cleveland State University will be bringing Billy Collins to the Ohio Theatre at Playhouse Square on November 8.

Tickets are $30... if you think that's a lot of cash to go hear a writer, hey, at least I'm glad to see writers get the star treatment...

Info on the William N. Skirball Writers Center Stage program is here:

The full list of 2011-2012 writers being featured includes in 2011

ELIZABETH STROUT Sept. 20
MICHAEL POLLAN Oct 24
BILLY COLLINS Nov. 8

and in Spring 2012:
ABRAHAM VERGHESE March 20
ANNE LAMOTT April 17
COLM TOIBIN May 1

Priming the pump...

Once again -

Billy Collins is peering inside the giant catfish searching, searching, and searching for a poem to fill this week's Blind Review Friday slot.

We're hoping for some new voices, and submissions from folks who have not submitted before will go to the front of the line.

Help the guy out – send your piece to

salinger@ameritech.net

with the subject line workshop the hell out of this poem just like it says over there in the left sidebar.

All poems received will be put into the cue.

Six poets make the top 15 list!

Anis Shivani of the Huffington Post slaps the sh!t out of the literary establishment with his list of the 15 most overrated writers in America.

Oooh! I love it when media pundits slam on writers who aren't me! (especially when the writers being dissed get eviscerated with witty insults.) More! Do more!

(He's wrong about Junot Diaz, though. The man's cool; he teaches at MIT! How cool is that? Oh, and I like Billy Collins, too, so sue me.)

Amazingly, of his list of fourteen* "most over-rated" writers, six are poets. Wow, he thinks Americans rate poetry that highly?? Really? Almost half** of the "most overrated" writers are poets?

Here's his poets, and a quote from his hatchet job each one:

• John Ashbery (Self-Portrait in a Broken Mirror): "More responsible than anyone else for turning late twentieth-century American poetry into a hermetic, self-enclosed, utterly private affair"
• Mary Oliver (Porcupines and Toads and Opossums and Turtles): "Publishes a book a year with interchangeable contents--how she has put on the brakes on her own evolution is the real wonder. Poems are free of striking images, ideas, or form."
• Sharon Olds (Tampons and Lactation): "Childbirth, her father's penis, her son's cock, and her daughter's vagina are repeated obsessions she can always count on in a pinch. Has given confessionalism such a bad name it can't possibly recover."
• Jorie Graham (The Dream of the Unified Field): "With her last few books, this philosopher of language has sought to become more and more unreadable."
• Louise Gluck (Odysseus and Ostracization): "She is perhaps our greatest example of mediocrity ascending to the very top."
• Billy Collins (Angels on Pins and Walking Across the Atlantic): "His poems have lately become mostly about writing poems--in his pajamas, with a cup of coffee in hand."

Lots of responses, on the webs and in the blogosphere, most of which (paraphrasing here) say he's a dick. Maybe the most succinct summary comes from Charles Jensen, who titles his post "everyone's a critic, but you're a bad one."

----

*(he lists a book reviewer who likes the preceeding authors as his final entry)

**42.9%, really. 40%, if you count the reviewer he saved for last.

Introduction to poetry

So, I see that the Library of Congress has Billy Collins' "Introduction to Poetry" posted on their site. Good for them! Bruce Weber called him “the most popular poet in America” in no less etheric a place than the New York Times, so I guess it's kinda plebian to like Billy Collins these days, but still, I think maybe he nailed it.

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...

For some light amusement, check out the whole poem. (My good friend Mr. Google tells me that it's posted about 4,640 places on the web... but it's officially still Mr. Collins' property, and so I'll let you go somewhere else for the whole thing.)

Part of Library of Congress' "Poetry 180" project-- 180 poems on the web.

Poems not a good fit with e-books

By HILLEL ITALIE
The Associated Press

Billy Collins, one of the country’s most popular poets, had never seen his work in e-book form until he recently downloaded his latest collection on his Kindle.

He was unpleasantly surprised....

[Read the rest of the article here.]

Hello - Is there anybody in there?

Once again -

Billy Collins is peering inside the giant catfish searching, searching, and searching for a poem to fill this week's Blind Review Friday slot.

We're hoping for some new voices, and submissions from folks who have not submitted before will go to the front of the line.

Help the guy out – send your piece to

salinger@ameritech.net

with the subject line workshop the hell out of this poem just like it says over there in the left sidebar.

All poems received will be put into the cue.

Where are the poems?

Once again -

Billy Collins is peering inside the giant catfish searching, searching, and searching for a poem to fill this week's Blind Review Friday slot.

We're hoping for some new voices, and submissions from folks who have not submitted before will go to the front of the line.

Help the guy out – send your piece to

salinger@ameritech.net

with the subject line workshop the hell out of this poem just like it says over there in the left sidebar.

All poems received will be put into the cue.

Hello - is there anybody in there?

Once again -

Billy Collins is peering inside the giant catfish searching, searching, and searching for a poem to fill this week's Blind Review Friday slot.

We don't know why he thinks there are poems in the fish - but then again we've never been asked to be poet laureate so he must be onto something.

Help the guy out – send your piece to

salinger@ameritech.net

with the subject line workshop the hell out of this poem just like it says over there in the left sidebar.

All poems received will be put into the cue.