Billy Collins served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003 and as New York State Poet from 2004 to 2006. Born in New York City, he is a distinguished professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York. His collections include The Apple That Astonished Paris (University of Arkansas Press, 1988), Sailing Alone Around the Room (Random House, 2001), and Aimless Love (Random House, 2013). He received the Poetry Foundation's inaugural Mark Twain Award in 2004 and the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets.
Who was your "gateway poet," the poet whose first book or poem made you want to write?
My poetry journey began after reading Beowulf in 6th grade. I found that poem confusing and inaccessible; I figured that’s what it takes to make a good poem. My writer friends were having a lot of fun after studying Mary Oliver without me. So I caved in, call it “peer pressure,” ... we read Billy Collins’s book, Sailing Alone Around the Room. Those poems were accessible and often humorous. After the first class, I said to myself, I can write poetry. This was a watershed moment in my writing life. Like many beginning poets, I wrote my first poems modeled after poems from that book, and then I evolved and took classes and the rest is history.