Poets & Writers Theater

In this 2020 Academy for Teachers craft talk, former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins discusses his theories on how poems find their way to an ending and discusses the works of David Berman, Wisława Szymborska, Tom Wayman, and others.

Watch this animated poem directed by Diego Maclean and narrated by Billy Collins, from the poet’s 1995 collection, The Art of Drowning (University of Pittsburgh Press).

“I ask them to take a poem / and hold it up to the light...” This animated video by Milos features Billy Collins narrating his poem “Introduction to Poetry” fromThe Apple That Astonished Paris (University of Arkansas Press, 1996). Collins’s new poetry collection, The Rain in Portugal (Random House, 2016), is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Bill Murray reads work by poets such as Billy Collins, Emily Dickinson, and Lorine Niedecker to an audience of construction workers who built the Poets House space in Battery Park City in New York City.

In this TED talk, former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins shares poems from the perspective of two very different dogs and reveals what they really feel about their masters.

Billy Collins, who was named the nation's poet laureate a few months before September 11, 2001, reads his poem "The Names" and talks with PBS NewsHour's Jeffrey Brown about the impact of 9/11.