Billy Collins was born the only child of William S. and Katherine M. Collins. Collins’s father was an electrician, and his mother was a nurse. Each of his parents was forty at the time of Collins’s birth. Collins grew up in Jackson Heights, a community in Queens, New York City. When he was in junior high school, his father became an insurance broker on Wall Street and, enjoying success in business, eventually moved his family to Westchester County.

Collins recalled his own precocious behavior at the age of four or five. When company arrived at his family’s home, he sat in a chair and pretended to read an encyclopedia, presuming that the guests were impressed. He also recalled his first effort to record an impression in writing: At age ten, he was in the family car as his parents drove along the East River, and Collins, seeing a sailboat, asked his mother for writing materials. At church he was an altar boy, and he cites his memorization of Latin phrases for the Mass as an influence on his later writing. He memorized the music of the sounds without knowing their meaning. Collins also remembered that his father brought home copies of Poetry from the office, and this reading material strengthened the young writer’s interest in poems.

Collins received a B.A. from the College of the Holy Cross in 1963. At the University of California, Riverside, he studied Romantic poetry, completing his Ph.D. in 1971. He had become assistant professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York in 1969. There he taught composition and literature, writing poems during his free time. Always connected to student activities, Collins contributed poems to Echo, the student literary arts magazine at Lehman. These poems were short and effective because of their creative imagery and humor; they exhibited some of the wit and style made popular by Richard Brautigan. Soon these short, provocative poems began to appear regularly in Rolling Stone, the magazine that in the early 1970’s focused on music and counterculture. He married Diane Olbright on January 21, 1979. Collins became distinguished professor of English at Lehman College, and Diane, who once worked for ABC’s Wide World of Sports, was an architect.

Pokerface, a limited edition of four hundred copies, was Collins’s first book. Video Poems, also a small-press publication, appeared in 1980. The poems are...

In the early 1990s, Billy Collins became a major figure in the public imagination and, in the last ten years, has become arguably one of the...