Picnic, Lightning

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Picnic, Lightning Pub. Date: 1/29/1998 Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
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Picnic, Lightning Pub. Date: 3/12/2003 Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

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Overview

Over the past decade, Billy Collins has emerged as the most beloved American poet since Robert Frost, garnering critical acclaim and broad popular appeal. Annie Proulx admits, "I have never before felt possessive about a poet, but I am fiercely glad that Billy Collins is ours." John Updike proclaims his poems "consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides." This special, limited edition celebrates Billy Collins's years as U.S. Poet Laureate. Picnic, Lightning -- one of the books that helped establish and secure his reputation and popularity during the 1990s -- combines humor and seriousness, wit and sublimity. His poems touch on a wide range of subjects, from jazz to death, from weather to sex, but share common ground where the mind and heart can meet. Whether reading him for the first time or the fiftieth, this collector's edition is a must-have for anyone interested in the poet the New York Times calls simply "the real thing."

What People Are Saying

John Updike

Billy Collins writes lovely poems -- lovely in a way almost nobody's since Roethke's are.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780822956709
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date: 1/29/1998
Pages: 104
Sales rank: 371,144
Series: Pitt Poetry Series
Product dimensions: 6.13 (w) x 8.00 (h) x 0.40 (d)

Meet the Author

Billy Collins

Enjoying a popularity unheard of for most poets, Billy Collins has had a remarkable late-life surge, aided by NPR exposure and his 2001 and 2002 appointments as the U.S. poet laureate. His style is engaging, conversational, funny, and surprising.

Biography

In 1985, the humorist Calvin Trillin suggested that Robert Penn Warren would never have been named Poet Laureate if he'd been known as plain Bob Warren. Trillin might be surprised at the 2002 appointment of Billy Collins -- whose laid-back name suits his open-collar-and-blue-jeans appearance, as well as his unpretentious writing style -- to a second term as U.S. Poet Laureate.

But then, Collins himself might be a little surprised. Like most poets, he toiled in obscurity for years, snowed under by rejections from small literary journals. As recently as 1997, he couldn't interest a commercial publisher in his fifth book of poems, Picnic, Lightning. But word of mouth and Collins' appearances on National Public Radio helped push sales of the book, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, far beyond the usual figures for a volume of poetry from a university press. A previous book was reissued, Random House signed him up for a three-book deal, and Collins was on his way to fame and comparative fortune.

Why is Collins so popular now? One term often applied to his work is "accessible," though he prefers the term "hospitable." "I think accessible just means that the reader can walk into the poem without difficulty," he explained to Elizabeth Farnsworth on the PBS NewsHour. Collins is also very funny -- and that, too, is inviting. For Collins, anything from the barking of a neighbor's dog to the egg-salad stain on a copy of The Catcher in the Rye can be a fit subject for a poem.

But Collins sees accessibility and humor as means to an end. The purpose of a poem, he believes, is to take the reader on an imaginative journey. "Poetry is my cheap means of transportation," he told a New York Times interviewer. "By the end of the poem the reader should be in a different place from where he started. I would like him to be slightly disoriented at the end, like I drove him outside of town at night and dropped him off in a cornfield."

Critics have sometimes charged that Collins' language is too prosaic, his middle-class milieu too smugly comfortable. But many of his contemporaries, including John Updike, Gerald Stern and Edward Hirsch, have admired his originality, wit and intelligence. As Richard Howard put it: "Mr. Collins is funny without being silly, moving without being silly, and brainy without being silly. If only he were silly, we should know how to 'place' him. But he is merely -- merely! -- funny, moving, brainy. That will have to do."

Good To Know

Collins grew up in Jackson Heights, Queens, where his electrician father sometimes brought home issues of Poetry magazine from an office on Wall Street. "He wanted me to go to Harvard Business School," Collins said in a Hope magazine interview. "If he had known the effect of those magazines, he probably would have burned them."

As Poet Laureate, Collins launched a well-received program called Poetry 180, which encourages high schools to read a contemporary poem together each day, preferably by having a student, teacher or staff member read the poem aloud.

Collins is a professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York. He lives in Somers, N.Y.

1. Also Known As:
  
  William James Collins
2. Hometown:
  
  Somers, New York
1. Date of Birth:
  
  March 22, 1941
2. Place of Birth:
  
  New York, New York
1. Education:
  
  B.A., Holy Cross College, 1963; Ph.D. in Romantic poetry, University of California at Riverside, 1971

	A Portrait of the Reader with a Bowl of Cereal	3
	Fishing on the Susquehanna in July	7
	To a Stranger Born in Some Distant Country Hundreds of Years from Now	9
	I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey's Version of "Three Blind Mice"	10
	Afternoon with Irish Cows	12
	Marginalia	14
	What I Learned Today	17
	Journal	20
	Some Days	22
	Silence	23
	Picnic, Lightning	24
	In the Room of a Thousand Miles	29
	Morning	31
	Bonsai	32
	Splitting Wood	34
	Shoveling Snow with Buddha	37
	I Go Back to the House for a Book	39
	After the Storm	41
	Snow	44
	Moon	46
	Looking West	48
	This Much I Do Remember	49
	Japan	51
	Victoria's Secret	55
	Musee des Beaux Art Revisited	59
	Lines Composed Over Three Thousand Miles from Tintern Abbey	61
	Paradelle for Susan	64
	Duck/Rabbit	65
	Egypt	66
	Home Again	68
	Lines Lost Among Trees	70
	The Many Faces of Jazz	72
	Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes	74
	The Night House	79
	The Death of the Hat	81
	The List of Ancient Pastimes	83
	Passengers	85
	Serpentine	87
	Reincarnation and You	89
	Jazz and Nature	91
	And His Sextet	94
	Where I Live	96
	My Life	98
	Aristotle	100
	Acknowledgments	103

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Anonymous

Posted January 19, 2001

Probably the best poetry book I ever read

yes, I thoroughly enjoyed this title, I recommend it, Billy Collins is a natural, a gifted writer, his insights are penetrating.

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Picnic, Lightning

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Overview

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Overview

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What People Are Saying

John Updike

Product Details

Meet the Author

Billy Collins

Biography

Good To Know

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Probably the best poetry book I ever read