Sailing Alone Around the Room (1000 Books to Read)

Some of these poems made me laugh out loud! Most were delightful. Poems are not meant to be overanalyzed and just enjoyed. 

These are the ones I liked (some are linked):

Walking Across the Atlantic

Books 

Introduction to Poetry

The Dead

The History Teacher (my favorite)

First Reader

Nostalgia (this link has the author reading it to a laughing audience)
Consolation 

"Why feed scenery into a hungry, one-eyed camera

eager to eat the world one monument at a time?" 

Osso Buco

Directions

Tuesday, June 4, 1991

The Blues

Strauss

I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey's Version of "Three Blind Mice"

Marginalia

Lines Lost Among Trees

The Death of the Hat

Sonnet

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

James Mustich

Jul 31, 2018

Billy Collins is a very funny guy, and there aren’t too many former Poet Laureates of whom that can be said. Be his subject poetry workshops or forgetfulness, saxophones or cows, canceling a vacation or nursing a hangover, Collins shapes his poems with a gentle but incisive humor that is ingratiating, intelligent, and, with delightful regularity, inspired. In his work the immediate genius of a stand-up comic is allied with the slow intelligence—the layering of life, learning, and lyrical intuition—of an accomplished poet, so that the reader is transported over the edge of understanding and, for a moment, suspended in the freedom of an imaginative leap.