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William "Billy" Collins was born on March 22, 1941 in New York, New York. Collins began working on poetry in highschool and he got one of his poems about adolescent despair published in the school newspaper. This caused and bit of a stir with the administration and anyone seen reading the poem was suspended. Collins then went onto to get his Ph.D in romantic poetry at the University of California and in 1969 went on to become a professor at Lehman college. Collins has written many books of poetry such as Nine Horses (2002); Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems (2001The Art of Drowning (1995), which was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and many others. Collins has since done many things to help the poet community. He has led some poetry workshops in a university in Ireland and has taught at different colleges. In 2001, Collins became the U.S. Poet Laurate (Consultant to the library of Congress) taking the place of Stanly Kunitiz. After thirty years of teaching at different collages areound New York, he now lives in Somers, New York with his wife Diane, who is an architect.

POETRY LINKS
[|Flames] [|Introdution To Poetry] [|Invention] [|On Turning Ten] [|The Art Of Drowning]

Explication of "[|Forgetfulness]" (click on the link to view the poem)
The poem called "Forgetfulness" by Billy Collins is about people forgetting things. Forgetting everything and just having to just watch it walk away. As far as I can see there is no specific name for the type of poem there is no rhyme scheme, just Billy Collins showing some poetic license. In the is poem Collins is saying that as humans we are always forgetting the things that we learn. In the first stanza Collins starts with the books and authors that seem to leave our mind without us even realizing. The second stanza is talking about different memories that are then forgotten and moves to a little fishing village where there are no phones. The third and fourth stanza are Collins naming other things that have been forgotten, other things that are slipping away. In the fifth staza Collins is telling us how we keep struggling to remember what we have forgotten but nothing seems to come, nothing there for us to remember. The sixth stanza tells us that our memories or things we learned that have floated down the dark mythological lake. Finally to sum up the entire poem, Collins is saying that we all forget things, slowly but surely the things that we have learned or seen and things we once remembered slip from our mind never to thought about again. This poem was wonderful, it really struck me. It really struck me beacause it was so true. There are times when I'll take a test and the next day if you ask me a question about it, I would have no answer. There are times when I can't even remember what i did yesterday. i really enjoyed this poem and I would recomend it to anyone.

Sources-
====Barbato, Joseph, and Michael Coffey.. "Poet on a Roll Takes Stock." __Publishers Weekly__ 248.38 (17 Sep. 2001): 48. __Literary Reference Center__. EBSCO. [Library name], [City], [State abbreviation]. 3 Dec. 2008 .==== ====Collins." __Academy of American Poets -- Biographies of American Poets__ (Jan. 2006): 222-222. __Literary Reference Center__. EBSCO. [Library name], [City], [State abbreviation]. 3 Dec. 2008 . -==== ===="Billy Collins." //Encyclopedia of World Biography Supplement//, Vol. 28. Gale, 2008. Reproduced in History Resource Center. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale. [|http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/HistRC/]====