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Billy Collins kicks off Decatur Book Festival
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Bill Starr, head of the Georgia Center for the Book, stood outside Agnes Scott College’s Presser Hall Friday night and looked out on a long line of people waiting to get inside, as if behind a velvert rope at a trendy nightclub.
“Isn’t it amazing,” he said, ” to have 1,000 people show up and waiting in line to hear a poet?”
It was, but the poet was former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins, who gave the third annual Decatur Book Festival’s keynote address Friday and had the audience laughing along as if they were at The Punch Line instead of a poetry reading. After hearing that Robert Frost had read in Presser Hall, Collins noted, “Compared to Frost, my poems are like a dorm room after a long, bad weekend.”
Collins was droll and disarming, and perhaps more reminiscent of comedian Steve Wright than of Frost, tossing off self-deprecating humor. He read “The Revenant,” in which a dead dog’s spirit comes back to tell his master he hated him while alive and fantasized about biting him:
“I admit the sight of the leash
would excite me
but only because it meant I was about
to smell things you had never touched.”
In the easy flow of “Fishing on the Susquehanna in July,” he states he has never been fishing, period.
After a barely peceptible bow to strong applause, Collins took questions from the audience. Asked how he was selected to be poet laureate in 2001, he joked that in his mind, the Librarian of Congress asked five other, better poets first, but they all declined, and he just kept going down the list until he got to someone who accepted.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment | Categories: Books
Comments
By margaret
August 31, 2008 9:49 PM | Link to this
I love his poems at youtube. Heh, I wanted to send one to a friend, but it was about death and it seemed a little… serious.
I wanted to see him but I’m two hours from Decatur so I had to settle for Saturday.
By Susan Brd
September 2, 2008 9:26 PM | Link to this
WHAT ARE THE EMAL ADDRESSES TO SEND A PRESS RELEASE TO REGARDING A FILM THAT WAS MADE IN dECATUR RECENTLY tHANK YOU