It abated for two weeks, but made a resurgence in the last week: I keep getting Google hits for Billy Collins’s “Lanyard,” in many imaginative forms: quotes, non quotes, different orders of words. The text is not here, folks; I only mentioned that he read it on the last day of the Geraldine Dodge Poetry Fest, but I did not transcribe it, sorry. It is not in any book or magazine that I know of yet either.
To satisfy you good searchers who don’t care about the readings set list (linked on the Incomplete Index to the right), I have an anecdote. Setup: apparently Collins had read it in a panel or during his reading or both the Friday before, and people were all abuzz about it on Saturday morning when Edward Hirsch was speaking on craft. Edward Hirsch is a large man with white hair and an imposing Jewish nose and laughing eyes: very personable, with a keen sense of the audience, and ready to switch gears and talk seriously about craft, going in a swift transition from avuncular to philosophical... In the panel yesterday, you were sitting with Billy Collins. Could you speak to revision, vis a vis Collins’s “Lanyard?”
...Billy Collins’s approach is opposed to Valéry’s, who thought of the poem as a created artifiact, and follows Frank O’Hara. If it doesn’t come out right the first time, it’s not worth revising. Of course, reading a lot of O’Hara, you realize that there is a lot of crap. [Leaning conspiratorially to the audience:] Maybe Billy Collins can always do it right the first time. Maybe he’s lying. ...and back again.
11:24:37 PM 
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