Poet Laureate Collins stops by the Ritz

Billy Collins, Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001-2003, slipped in and out of Sarasota this weekend, keynote speaker at a black-tie dinner meeting of the American Clinical and Climatological Association at the Ritz Carlton Friday night.

Collins, wearing a black suit, has a home in Winter Park, where is is a senior fellow at the Winter Park Institute; an ex-wife lives on Siesta Key.

“It’s great to be here surrounded by doctors,” he said. “I’m fine…”

Billy Collins signs books Saturday morning at the ACCA meeting.

The ACCA was established in 1884 by a group of doctors and scientists who “set about to improve medical education, research and practice in this country.  Its initial concern was with tuberculosis and its treatment by residence in a suitable climate,” according to the group’s website.

Collins read a number of poems from his several collections, including a new poem about sandhill cranes in Nebraska; the poem’s theme revolved around always being too early or too late for amazing natural phenomena, from fall foliage to the annual migration of the cranes.

His winters in Florida sparked a poem about ospreys, just of the many examples of Florida flora and fauna that one as a resident is expected to know, “or at least know the difference between birds and flowers,” he said. The osprey, he said, was the sort of the bird that, were you to see one in his home state of New York, “you’d call somebody.”

Collins employed his wryly humorous tone to poems about layabout teenagers, contrasting their lack of ambition to what various figures throughout history from Joan of Arc to Mozart  had accomplished by their late teens, and to the omnipresent use of “Ohmygod” by young people, “a bright thread of awe” woven through their daily lives.

Collins said he sometimes advises students to work a dog into their poems.

“They just have a way of cheering up the scene,” he said, immediately disproving it with an ironic poem told from the point of view of a dog that has just been euthanized by his owner.

“Poems about domestic pets can get very moist, very sentimental,” he said. “I thought I would see if I could write a poem about a dog that was completely dry-eyed.”

Between poems, Collins offered some insight into his writing.

“Most of the time I don’t know where I am going with these poems,” he said. “I can see you nodding your heads: ‘You’ve made that abudnantly clear.’

“I forget what time I started — three hours ago? I’ll read a few more and we can do something else.”