Nicknamed “the most popular poet in America” in The New York Times by Bruce Weber, Billy Collins is known for his witty, humorous poems that draw readers in with light comedy, but typically slide into bizarre, clever, and/or erudite observation on the day-to-day, often understated, details of life, reading, writing, and poetry itself. Time after time again, Collins’ poems have caused readers to pause and think about the world around them. For instance, his poem “I Go Back To The House For A Book”
In his poem “Forgetfulness,” Billy Collins writes about the memories people lose while growing old. When looking at the title, one can come to the conclusion that the poem is about forgetting something. It also set the reader up for what the poem might be about. The structure of his descriptive poem is able to show how Collins would have said it as if he is reading it. The first 2 stanzas are broken up from one idea. Collins repeats this process once more, but as if to emphasize the idea and catch
“Picnic, Lightning” by Billy Collins is a poem that is composed of five stanzas containing six sentences and has 40 lines that run into each other. This structure highlights the simplicity of the piece as well as Billy Collins’ uniquely simplistic writing style. “Picnic, Lightning” focuses on death being as much a part nature as life, and inexorable to everyone. Death has many uncontrollable factors from when where and even how you die. And it is because of this realization that death is everywhere
Billy Collins’ poem, “Introduction to Poetry” provides a coded guide to help beginning readers understand how to unlock the mysteries of poetry. The speaker urges readers to read critically with an emphasis on the poem’s structure, sound, and artistic merit, but cautions them against getting so caught up in the search for meaning that they forget to enjoy the poem. The speaker wants readers to “see” and “hear” what the poem is trying to convey. In stanzas one and two, the speaker describes what
In Billy Collins’s “Introduction to Poetry”, Collins expresses the fact that instead of enjoying the beauty of a poem, some people only want to find out the meaning. The teacher, who is also the narrator, starts the poem with a simile where he/she wants the students “to take a poem / and hold it up to the light / like a color slide” (Collins 1-3). The simile makes the reader compare a poem to a color slide, something that is difficult to see clearly unless examined closely. The word “I” is used
are looking for, search for something greater than you. In “Shoveling Snow with Buddha,” Billy Collins demonstrates how one can find their enjoyment, purpose, and faith in the simple pleasures of life. Humans tend to relate or picture a temple or church when they think about spirituality. When one hears Buddhism they automatically think of a fat guy sitting cross-legged because “sitting is more his speed”(Collins
invited Billy Collins, a distinguished professor of City University of New York and State University of New York, to speak to all the faculty, student, and their relatives on June 3, 2001. He uses some poems and his life experience to give advices to the audience at the commencement. This speech is transcribed into a written article for anyone who wants to read and get his advice. I’m going to discuss the purpose of this article and the genre of commencement address on the writing aspect. Billy Collins’
Title, & Traits: Billy Pilgrim: protagonist; WWII soldier and prisoner-of-war survivor, and optometrist after the war; weak, strange, passive Bernard O’Hare: former soldier and POW at Dresden who helps Vonnegut write his story about Dresden; helpful Mary O’Hare: wife of Bernard; convinces Vonnegut to tell how bad war really is; honest, realist Gerhard Müller: taxi driver who helps Vonnegut write his story; helpful, peaceful, kind Roland Weary: antagonist; soldier who saves Billy during the war;
“[l]isten” at the beginning of chapter two, he first tells us that “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time” (23). He follows that statement with the fact that “Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day” (23). The implication here is that he became unstuck in time for the first time after having gone to sleep “a senile widower.” The description of him as “a senile widower” contradicts the statement that Billy has seen and experienced his own assassination in 1976, and it
Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five revolves around the novel’s protagonist Billy Pilgrim, an awkward and weak man, who has become “unstuck in time”. After growing up in Illium, New York, he is drafted into the army of World War II. He states how he has lived a dreadful life and during his times of war in Dresden, he often goes into the future and travels back to the past while visiting different events, hence the term “unstuck in time”. On the night of his daughter’s wedding, he explains how