Dogs and Billy Collins

In a PBS interview for a new collection of Billy Collins' poems about dogs, it is said that nobody can fully understand the meaning of love unless they have had a dog. Collins agrees. 

The former U.S. poet laureate is a literary lion of the New York Public Library and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He recently released his 12th collection of poetry titled Dog Show.

Billy Collins, a dog lover and owner who's been writing about them for decades, he's now pulled together a selection of those poems in a volume he's dedicated to 85 dogs, those of friends as well as his own. The book is illustrated with Pamela Sztybel’s watercolors,

Watercolor illustrations by Pamela Sztybel help show what's beguiled Collins ever since he got his first dog as an only child. 

When we got a dog from the pound, my father said: "We're going to get a dog, but, remember, we're buying a heartache," which was, the dog's going to die before we will, which is a fact of dog and human life. Somebody said, the only -- dogs are flawless, except they die too soon. 

That's what we're trying to avoid, is the -- bring up the violins and -- but I do have that poem of -- you know, I think, "A Dog on His Master."

A Dog on His Master.
As young as I look, I'm growing older faster than he. 
Seven to one is the ratio they tend to say. 
Whatever the number, I will pass them one day 
and take the lead, the way I do on our walks in the woods. 
And if this ever manages to cross his mind, 
it would be the sweetest shadow I have ever cast on snow or grass.

On the craft of writing poetry:

I think the craft part comes from having taught English literature for many, many decades and having this kind of Rolodex of poetic stuff revolving and teaching semester after semester, Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, Hardy.

On the voice of his poems: 

So the voice in my poems is very straightforward. It's without guile and even kind of chummy with the reader. Someone said no line must sleep. Every line needs to be aware of the lines around it, as opposed to prose, where the sentences just drive forward. Poetry is a language that means more and sounds better than other written expressions.

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