#billy collins

[sweatermuppet]

billy collins in response to being asked "if you aren't a poet, but were interested in getting started, how would you do that?"

watch the full video here

#read poetry for 10000 hours. new years resolution #billy collins #poetry

[sicknessinmotion]

on forgetting & remembering. / billy collins — nick flynn — gwendolyn brooks — alex dimitrov — ocean vuong.

#poetry #quotes #web weaving #webweaving #.w #words #excerpts #writing #on forgetting #on memory #billy collins #nick flynn #gwendolyn brooks #alex dimitrov #ocean vuong

[solar-settings]

elegy, billy collins // lottie & nat, yellowjackets

#this makes sense to me #yellowjackets #lottie matthews #natalie scatorccio #lottienat #lottie x nat #nat x lottie #lottie x natalie #natalie x lottie #billy collins #mine #web weaving

[lizormianillustration]

give me hares or give me death

#they're just spooky little guys #illustration #illustrators on tumblr #art #drawing #artists on tumblr #lord huron #the amazing devil #florence and the machine #billy collins

[apoemaday]

Sonnet

by Billy Collins

All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now, and after this one just a dozen to launch a little ship on love’s storm-tossed seas, then only ten more left like rows of beans. How easily it goes unless you get Elizabethan and insist the iambic bongos must be played and rhymes positioned at the ends of lines, one for every station of the cross. But hang on here wile we make the turn into the final six where all will be resolved, where longing and heartache will find an end, where Laura will tell Petrarch to put down his pen, take off those crazy medieval tights, blow out the lights, and come at last to bed.

#poetry #billy collins #sonnet

[moonstoast]

—on childhood

deathless by catherynne m. valente // poison ivy by justin kurland // forest by justin kurland // seven by taylor swift // the florida project (2017) // on turning ten by billy collins // michael sowa // ? // vincent van gogh // don’t you wonder sometimes? by tracy k. smith

#words #art #movies #lyrics #photography #web weave #web weaving #comparatives #childhood #taylor swift #the florida project #van gogh #justin kurland #billy collins

[firstfullmoon]

franz wright / ada limón / billy collins

#w #poetry #comparatives #franz wright #ada limón #billy collins #maybe all pain in the world requires poetry

[dabiconcordia]

Consolation

How agreeable it is not to be touring Italy this summer, wandering her cities and ascending her torrid hilltowns. How much better to cruise these local, familiar streets, fully grasping the meaning of every roadsign and billboard and all the sudden hand gestures of my compatriots.

There are no abbeys here, no crumbling frescoes or famous domes and there is no need to memorize a succession of kings or tour the dripping corners of a dungeon. No need to stand around a sarcophagus, see Napoleon's little bed on Elba, or view the bones of a saint under glass.

How much better to command the simple precinct of home than be dwarfed by pillar, arch, and basilica. Why hide my head in phrase books and wrinkled maps? Why feed scenery into a hungry, one-eyes camera eager to eat the world one monument at a time?

Instead of slouching in a café ignorant of the word for ice, I will head down to the coffee shop and the waitress known as Dot. I will slide into the flow of the morning paper, all language barriers down, rivers of idiom running freely, eggs over easy on the way.

And after breakfast, I will not have to find someone willing to photograph me with my arm around the owner. I will not puzzle over the bill or record in a journal what I had to eat and how the sun came in the window. It is enough to climb back into the car

as if it were the great car of English itself and sounding my loud vernacular horn, speed off down a road that will never lead to Rome, not even Bologna. By Billy Collins

#areg every #photo pinterest.com #consolation #billy collins #car #staying at home

[sashayed]

In All the Excitement I Forgot to Ask His Name

In the middle of a walk across San Diego’s famed Balboa Park one damp, sea-soaked morning, I was politely introduced

by a woman in a blue jogging suit to the third fastest whippet in America, a young, wiry, white and tan creature crouching tensely by her side.

He can cover 200 yards in 11 seconds and crosses the tape at 35 miles per hour, she told me, as we stood under an enormous eucalyptus tree.

The dog was paying no attention. He was staring straight ahead across what looked like 200 yards of open lawn, restrained by a special leather leash.

Young, wiry, white and tan, poised at the end of a century of breeding, his tail was coiled under his belly, he had 11 seconds dancing in his eyes.

Billy Collins in Poetry, May 2003

#poetry #national poetry month #billy collins

[april-is]

April 8, 2024: As If to Demonstrate an Eclipse, Billy Collins

As If to Demonstrate an Eclipse Billy Collins

I pick an orange from a wicker basket and place it on the table to represent the sun. Then down at the other end a blue and white marble becomes the earth and nearby I lay the little moon of an aspirin.

I get a glass from a cabinet, open a bottle of wine, then I sit in a ladder-back chair, a benevolent god presiding over a miniature creation myth,

and I begin to sing a homemade canticle of thanks for this perfect little arrangement, for not making the earth too hot or cold not making it spin too fast or slow

so that the grove of orange trees and the owl become possible, not to mention the rolling wave, the play of clouds, geese in flight, and the Z of lightning on a dark lake.

Then I fill my glass again and give thanks for the trout, the oak, and the yellow feather,

singing the room full of shadows, as sun and earth and moon circle one another in their impeccable orbits and I get more and more cockeyed with gratitude.

--

Also: Seeing the Eclipse in Maine, Robert Bly

Enjoy today's eclipse, North America!

More space-related poems.

Today in:

2023: Neither Time Nor Grief is a Flat Circle, Christina Olson 2022: Pippi Longstocking, Sandra Simonds 2021: Waking After the Surgery, Leila Chatti 2020: Gutbucket, Kevin Young 2019: Insomnia, Linda Pastan 2018: How Many Nights, Galway Kinnell 2017: The Little Book of Hand Shadows, Deborah Digges 2016: Now I Pray, Kathy Engel 2015: Why I’m Here, Jacqueline Berger 2014: Snow, Aldo, Kate DiCamillo 2013: from The Escape, Philip Levine 2012: Thirst, Mary Oliver 2011: Getting Away with It, Jack Gilbert 2010: *turning, Annie Guthrie 2009: I Don’t Fear Death, Sandra Beasley 2008: The Dover Bitch, Anthony Hecht 2007: Death Comes To Me Again, A Girl, Dorianne Laux 2006: Up Jumped Spring, Al Young 2005: Old Women in Eliot Poems, David Wright

#billy collins #feast on your life #poetry #national poetry month

[fishingforwords]

what else am i forgetting?

fernando pessoa, the book of disquiet: the complete edition || arturo ferrari, in the old street vicolo san bernardino alle ossa a milano || madisen kuhn, please don't go before i get better || james bay, let it go || imagine dragons, i was me || holly black, the cruel prince || amazon || billy collins, forgetfulness || salvador dali, disintegration of the persistence of memory

#on forgetting #on memory #on identity #on loss #web weaving #my weavings #fernando pessoa #arturo ferrari #madisen kuhn #james bay #imagine dragons #holly black #the cruel prince #billy collins #forgetfulness #salvador dali #disintegration of the persistence of memory

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Look in art: Sun Yuan & Peng Yu

Sun Yuan [born 1972] and Peng Yu [born 1974] are artists living and working collaboratively in Beijing.

* * * *

Billy Collins, “The Afterlife” →

They’re moving off in all imaginable directions,

each according to his own private belief, and this is the secret that silent Lazarus would not reveal: that everyone is right, as it turns out. you go to the place you always thought you would go, the place you kept lit in an alcove in your head. Some are being shot into a funnel of flashing colors into a zone of light, white as a January sun. Others are standing naked before a forbidding judge who sits with a golden ladder on one side, a coal chute on the other. Some have already joined the celestial choir and are singing as if they have been doing this forever, while the less inventive find themselves stuck in a big air conditioned room full of food and chorus girls. Some are approaching the apartment of the female God, a woman in her forties with short wiry hair and glasses hanging from her neck by a string. With one eye she regards the dead through a hole in her door. There are those who are squeezing into the bodies of animals—eagles and leopards—and one trying on the skin of a monkey like a tight suit, ready to begin another life in a more simple key, while others float off into some benign vagueness, little units of energy heading for the ultimate elsewhere. There are even a few classicists being led to an underworld by a mythological creature with a beard and hooves. He will bring them to the mouth of the furious cave guarded over by Edith Hamilton and her three-headed dog. The rest just lie on their backs in their coffins wishing they could return so they could learn Italian or see the pyramids, or play some golf in a light rain. They wish they could wake in the morning like you and stand at a window examining the winter trees, every branch traced with the ghost writing of snow.

#poem #poetry #angel #fallen angel #the afterlife #billy collins #Sun Yuan #Peng Yu

[aemperatrix]

Billy Collins

#billy collins #poetry #the end of the world #poem #cuvinte potrivite #in this wounded sinister place

[oflights]

Irish Poetry

That morning under a pale hood of sky I heard the unambiguous scrape of spackling against the side of our wickered, penitential house.

The day mirled and clabbered in the thick, stony light, and the rooks’ feathered narling astounded the salt waves, the plush coast.

I lugged a bucket past the forked coercion of a tree, up toward the pious and nictitating preeminence of a school, hunkered there in its gully of learning.

Only later, by the galvanized washstand, while gaunt, phosphorescent heifers swam beyond the windows, did the whorled and sparky gib of the indefinite wobble me into knowledge.

Then, I heard the ghost-clink of milk bottle on the rough threshold and understood the meadow-bells that trembled over a nimbus of ragwort— the whole afternoon lambent, corrugated, puddle-mad.

Billy Collins

#it's national poetry month!!! #billy collins #irish poetry #poetry #how have i never posted a billy collins poem for this series #'gully of learning' is something i think about all the time it's so good

[lizormianillustration]

forgetfulness - billy collins

#illustration #illustrators on tumblr #drawing #art #books & libraries #poetry #billy collins #short comic #comics

[apoemaday]

The History Teacher

by Billy Collins Trying to protect his students' innocence he told them the Ice Age was really just the Chilly Age, a period of a million years when everyone had to wear sweaters. And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age, named after the long driveways of the time. The Spanish Inquisition was nothing more than an outbreak of questions such as "How far is it from here to Madrid?" "What do you call the matador's hat?" The War of the Roses took place in a garden, and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom on Japan. The children would leave his classroom for the playground to torment the weak and the smart, mussing up their hair and breaking their glasses, while he gathered up his notes and walked home past flower beds and white picket fences, wondering if they would believe that soldiers in the Boer War told long, rambling stories designed to make the enemy nod off.

#poetry #billy collins #the history teacher