Wednesday, March 22, 7:45 pm

"Billy Collins is an American original, a metaphysical poet with a funny bone and a sly questioning intelligence. He is an ironist of the void and his poems-witty, playful, and beautifully turned-bump up against the deepest human mysteries." (Edward Hirsch on The Art of Drowning)

"No freshly encountered poet since Frank O'Hara has given me, as a common reader, more unalloyed pleasure." (Warner Berthoff, Boston Book Review)

"Collins is jazzman and Buddhist, charmer and prince." (Booklist)

Collins is the author of six books of poetry, including Picnic, Lightning (1997), The Art of Drowning (1995), The Apple That Astonished Paris (1988), and Questions About Angels (1991), which was selected by Edward Hirsch for the National Poetry Series. He has also recorded a spoken word CD, The Best Cigarette (1997). His poetry has appeared in a variety of periodicals as well as in The Pushcart Prizes and The Best American Poetry volumes of 1992, 1993, and 1997. Among his numerous awards are fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 1992 he was chosen by the New York Public Library to serve as "Literary Lion." He is poet-in-residence at College of Art in Ireland as well as professor of English at Lehman College (CUNY) and a visiting writer at Sarah Lawrence College.

Putting Down the Cat

The assistant holds her on the table,
the fur hanging limp from her tiny skeleton,
and the veterinarian raises the needle of fluid
which will put the line through her ninth life.

"Painless," he reassures me, "like counting
backwards from a hundred," but I want to tell him
that our poor cat cannot count at all,
much less to a hundred, much less backwards.