Billy Collins returns to Featherstone Center for the Arts this weekend in partnership with PathwaysArts to give a reading from his latest book of poems Dog Show and to lead a poetry workshop.
The former U.S. Poet Laureate has been a frequent visitor to the Vineyard going back to 2007. Since then he has followed a fairly regular migration pattern, arriving every other year until a broken tibia sidelined his last scheduled reading here in 2024.
Mr. Collins is 85 but shows no sign of slowing down. Although, during a phone interview from his home in Florida, Mr. Collins suggested he had always preferred the slow lane.
“Writers are often asked, ‘How do you balance your work life and family life and creative life, or something to that effect,’” he said. “But for me, it’s always been, ‘How do you balance writing a poem every once in a while and then doing nothing for a month.’”
That pace has been good to him, producing 20 books during his long career, in addition to editing other books and working as a professor of English at Lehman College in the Bronx, and accumulating numerous awards.
At the poetry workshop on Friday, Mr. Collins said he will mostly advise participants on the poetic form.
“Many people discover they want to write poetry but there is no obvious training for it. After all, you can just pick up a pen and express your feelings. That is the content. But there needs to be structure to it,” he said.
He compared this use of structure to “cleaning up your room or making your bed.”
There is also a social aspect to a poem, he added.
“It should sound like a human being talking to someone, not just typewriting,” he said. “In other words, there should be a respect for the reader, or at least an awareness of a reader.”
For Mr. Collins, this respect for the reader has earned him fans all over the world, making him that rare poet whose readings often result in sell-out crowds.
At Featherstone on Saturday, he said he will be reading mostly from Dog Show, which is composed of 25 poems about dogs, along with watercolors by Pamela Sztybel.
When asked if the dogs were inspired by canines he has known, he replied that they were “poetry dogs who had caught the attention of the poet.”
If that sounds vague, it is perhaps meant to be so. Mr. Collins said he has always thought of poems as a mixture of clarity and mystery, but that one “needs to know when to be clear and when to be mysterious.”
He said clarity usually begins his poems in order to engage and welcome the reader, and then they may travel to more cryptic places. Lately, however, he has found his poetic voice shifting away from being so helpful to the reader.
“I’m becoming less friendly, less likable, but maybe more interesting,” he said. “It feels good, it feels new.”
Billy Collins will teach a poetry workshop at Featherstone Center for the Arts, in conjunction with PathwaysArts, on Friday, Sept. 25 from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. He will give a public reading at Featherstone on Saturday, Sept. 26, beginning at 6 p.m.
This article appears in September 25 2026.