UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS PRESS POET NAMED U.S. POET LAUREATE

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - Billy Collins, named the 11th U.S. Poet Laureate by the Library of Congress, will begin his one-year post in October by reading from his work, which includes a book published by the University of Arkansas Press, at the opening of the library's annual literary series.

Collins, distinguished professor of English at Lehman College in New York, is author of the book "The Apple That Astonished Paris," published by the University of Arkansas Press in 1988. He is also the author of "Picnic, Lightning" (Pittsburgh, 1998), "The Art of Drowning" (Pittsburgh, 1995) and "Questions About Angels" (Pittsburgh, 1991). His latest collection of poems, "Sailing Alone Around the Room," is scheduled to be released this fall by Random House.

Collins has received numerous honors for his poetry, including fellowships from the New York Foundation of the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has also won the Bess Hokin Prize, the Oscar Blumenthal Prize, the Frederick Bock Prize and the Levinson Prize from Poetry magazine.

His conversational tone and everyday subjects have made him one of the best selling contemporary poets. In "The Apple That Astonished Paris," Collins writes of love, death, name-calling toddlers, foreign lands, words and poetry itself, as in "Introduction to Poetry:"

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

He also tackles the realm of the whimsical in his poetry, imagining Frankenstein as a poet, writing an elegy for all the body parts collected on his behalf. In another poem, "Another Reason Why I Don't Keep A Gun In The House," a barking dog becomes inevitably entwined with a Beethoven symphony in the author's mind.

As Poet Laureate, Collins will be provided with a Washington office at the Library of Congress and a $35,000 stipend. He will continue to give poetry readings across the country.

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Laura Helper, marketing director, University of Arkansas Press, (479) 575-6657, lhelper@uark.edu

Melissa Blouin, science and research communications manager, (479) 575-5555, blouin@uark.edu