Well, the audio archive is up at PHC, so unless you’re looking to make a Mother’s Day card out of the text, you can click this to hear “The Lanyard.” It’s about eight minutes in. Stay awhile, though, do.
[Continuing:] Leave a comment if you find anything of interest. By the way, thank you, LibraryGirl and Carolina, for your unsolicited but not wholly unwelcome respective violations of copyright law in the comments [he says snarkily, as his own incidents with the estates of Weldon Kees and Philip Larkin slip off the front page]. I do believe that these comments, being transcriptions of part of a work (unpublished though it is), and quoting as part of a discussion of the merit of the work as a whole, contributing to the greater advancement of the art, ought not to violate copyright or infringe on Billy Collins’s exercise of that right. As poets, we learn that once the work is done, the poem is “out there,” as a teacher once told me, for good or bad, beyond our control, to work its effect on the audience, to be taken, breathed in, and, if the language is of merit and good luck holds, breathed out.
6:30:35 PM 
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