“Introduction to Poetry” by Billy Collins (1988)

Collins’s tongue-in-cheek description of a class learning about poetry argues for a different way of looking at a piece of writing or art. He wants his students to “drop a mouse into a poem / and watch him probe his way out” (Lines 5-6) or “waterski / across the surface of the poem” (Lines 9-10). All the students want to do, though, is “tie the poem to a chair with rope / and torture a confession out of it […] to find out what it really means” (Lines 13, 15, 16).

“Dancing Toward Bethlehem” by Billy Collins (1991)

Collins’s sonnet-like love poem alludes to one of the most famous modernist poems of the 20th century, William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” which includes the phrase “Slouches toward Bethlehem” (Line 22). With a tone decidedly more upbeat than Yeats’s, Collins writes about the end of the century, imagining a less fearsome apocalypse in which he dances with his beloved.

“The Best Cigarette” by Billy Collins (1997)

Emblematic of Collins’s tendency to write about small, mundane things, “The Best Cigarette” is a kind of ode to a lost habit, culminating in a description of how the best cigarettes helped with the writing process: “Then I would be my own locomotive, / trailing behind me as I returned to work / little puffs of smoke, / indicators of progress, / signs of industry and thought” (Lines 24-28).