National Poetry Month 2017: Billy Collins, The Lanyard

April is National Poetry Month. Despite the fact that I have been active in the local poetry scene for the last few years, I have somehow managed to consistently not acknowledge or even realize this until the end of the month. This year I'll try to keep up and post something daily. (I posted this to Facebook yesterday, so I haven't really missed a day.)

Billy Collins is one of my favorite poets. "The Trouble with Poetry" was the first book of poems I bought since getting an inexpensive copy of Shakespeare's sonnets back in high school. "The Lanyard" was the first poem I ever heard by him, on an episode of A Prairie Home Companion. Here he is reading it on April 7, 2008 at City Arts & Lectures in San Francisco.