By Gretchen Webster

WESTPORT — Poet Billy Collins charmed a Westport Library audience with his customary wit and thought-provoking humor Friday night.

Collins, a former U.S. poet  laureate, kept the sold-out crowd laughing and trying to keep up with his brilliant — and funny — poems. 

It was Collins’s second appearance at the library. In 2006, he was honored at that year’s Malloy Lecture in the Arts.

He entertained Friday’s gathering by reading a selection of his work. A few examples:

Children

There’s a movie out

Titled Children

I don’t know what it’s about

but I like the voice

on the radio

when it says:

“Children now playing everywhere.”

_______________________________

3:00 A M

Only my hand

is asleep,

but it’s a start.

Many of the poems were from his newest book, “Musical Tables,” a collection of short poems he penned during the pandemic.

The isolation of COVID was “not a gift of time,” he said. “It paralyzed me creatively. I couldn’t work with long poems.” So instead of the longer poems the popular poet usually writes, his verse became creatively short.

His editor viewed the change in Collins’s poetry to shorter verse as a new chapter and step forward in his work, the poet said. 

But, Collins joked, making his poetry shorter and shorter, “might be the beginning of the end.”

The Westport audience agreed with the editors, clearly enjoying every one of his new poems that Collins read.

The length of his poems, and the act of writing poetry and spreading his work and his message to as many as possible, were some of the topics Collins discussed with Connecticut’s Poet Laureate Antoinette Brim-Bell during his appearance.

“Your poetry makes people feel good,” she told Collins. 

Collins was the national poet laureate from 2001-03 and the New York state poet laureate from 2004-06 and has won numerous awards for his poetry. He is the author of 11 collections of poetry and participates in many programs to bring poetry to the public, including displaying poems on trains and subways, as well as distributing poetry to the elderly in the Meals On Wheels program. 

At Friday night’s presentation Collins and Brim-Bell were introduced by Westport’s Poet Laureate Jessica Noyes McEntee, who said Collins “has the ability to write seemingly effortlessly.”

Westport Library Director William Harmer called Collins “so funny he makes mundane things seem so special.” Collins’s level of fame is unprecedented in the world of contemporary poetry, he added.

Freelance writer Gretchen Webster, a Fairfield County journalist and journalism teacher for many years, was editor of the Fairfield Minuteman newspaper for 10 years and currently teaches journalism at Southern Connecticut State University.