Billy Collins' "Today"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 23 March 2022

⏱️ 4 minutes

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Summary

William James Collins (born March 22, 1941) is an American poet, appointed as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003.[1][2] He is a Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York (retired, 2016). Collins was recognized as a Literary Lion of the New York Public Library (1992) and selected as the New York State Poet for 2004 through 2006. In 2016, Collins was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.[3] As of 2020, he is a teacher in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the Daily Poem. I'm David Kern and today is Wednesday, March 23rd, 2022.
0:06.5	Today's poem is by a very famous poet, perhaps the most famous current American poet.
0:15.0	His name is Billy Collins, William James Collins, this is a birth name.
0:18.4	And I'm reading this poem to you today for two reasons. The first
0:21.9	is that Billy Collins' 82nd, or no, 81st birthday was yesterday, March 22nd. So in his honor,
0:31.6	it makes sense to read a poem by Billy Collins. I also wanted to read to you because this week
0:37.2	I'm focusing on spring poems. And so I wanted to read this spring poem for you.
0:42.2	The second reason why I want to read this poem to you is because I want to read a spring poem.
0:45.6	That's my focus this week here in the daily poem, and so combining Billy Collins with a spring poem makes sense.
0:53.1	Billy Collins was, of course,
0:55.2	poet laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003.
0:59.3	He was the distinguished professor at Lehman College
1:02.4	at the City and University of New York
1:04.0	and has received many other awards for his poetry.
1:08.8	And the poem that I'm going to read today is called Today.
1:12.6	It goes like this. If ever there were a spring day so perfect, so uplifted by a warm,
1:20.8	intermittent breeze that it made you want to throw open all the windows in the house and unlatched
1:25.8	the door to the canary's cage.
1:32.3	Indeed, ripped the little door from its jam. A day when the cool brick paths and the garden bursting with peonies seemed so etched in the sunlight that you felt like taking a hammer to the
1:37.0	glass paperway to the living room end table, releasing the inhabitants from their snow-covered
1:41.2	cottage so they could walk out, holding hands and squinting into this larger
1:44.9	dome of blue and white. Well, today is just that kind of day. In many ways, this is a classic
	...

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