BEST AUTHOR- [1] BEST : BILLY COLLINS

 

Poems about dead family members irk the former U.S. poet laureate : If I come across '' Dad '' or '' Mommy '' I'm out. '' Grandma gets a pass.'' His new collection is '' Water, Water.''

.-  Have you ever gotten into trouble for reading a book?

I got into trouble several times at my all-male Jesuit college for engaging in the nefarious act of reading after lights out.

In a dorm room whose window and door had been light-proofed with newspaper and tin foil. I would climb up into a luggage closet and shut the little door behind me. With a pillow for comfort and a flashlight taped to a heating pipe, the scene was made for reading.

After closing Camus's '' The Stranger, '' I descended a changed young man.

.-  Has the Internet changed your writing?

The internet asks us to speed up. Poetry invites us to slow down. I write with pencil and paper, then use the computer only as a fancy typewriter. So no change really, except in its role as the most persistent distraction in human history.

.-  '' Longing '' and '' invoking the heart '' have fallen out of fashion in poetry, you write. Do you miss them?

After the Romantic Movement, yearning and longing retreated from their high-water mark of popularity. They went the way of the exclamation point. And exclamation itself.

These days, instead of enving the skylark or the nightingale because it can fly and sing, the poet can just leap from the title, take wing and break into song. And instead of crying out to the heart  [ Oh heart!'' or '' Yo, heart! '' ], poets are mostly talking to themselves.

.-  What subjects do you wish more authors wrote about?

I have never recommended a subject to a fiction writer. I prefer novels where every little happens, except everything seems to be getting worse.

Jose Saramago's '' Blindness,'' for example. Emma Donoghue's '' Room.'' Or almost anything by Thomas Bernhard.

The Publishing continues to Part 2. The World Students Society thanks The New York Times.