Reply #8: Have you ever read or heard Billy Collins? He's really good. [View All]

[Up2Late]

Here's a link to a few of my favorites:

On Turning Ten

Another reason why I don't keep a gun in the house

Here's another one I heard on Garrison Keillor's "The Writers Almanac":

"To A Frustrated Poet," by R.J. Ellmann, used by permission of the poet.

To A Frustrated Poet

This is to say
I know
You wish you were in the woods,
Living the poet life,
Not here at a Formica topped table
In a meeting about perceived inequalities in the benefits and allowances
offered to
employees of this college,
And I too wish you were in the woods,
Because it's no fun having a frustrated poet
In the Dept. of Human Resources, believe me.
In the poems of yours that I've read, you seem ever intelligent and decent
and patient in a way

Not evident to us in this office,
And so, knowing how poets can make a feast out of trouble,
Raising flowers in a bed of drunkenness, divorce, despair,
I give you this check representing two weeks' wages
And ask you to clean out your desk today
And go home
And write a poem
With a real frog in it
And plums from the refrigerator,
So sweet and so cold.