By Billy Collins

Many of us poets have been asked
to go someplace, often somewhere
we have never been, nor would ever think
to go, to read our poems out loud.

Audiences gather in these places
to hear us read our poems out loud
and to see what we are wearing,
which is often part of the disappointment.

Someone said that professors get paid
to read, but poets get paid to read out loud.

Julian Barnes said: they don’t come
to hear you read your work.
They want to know what you had for breakfast.

I think it’s a little of both,
as in Galway Kinnell’s poem called “Oatmeal,”
which is both beautiful and informative
regarding what the poet likes for breakfast.

It’s about having breakfast with John Keats
and he must have read that poem out loud
many times and in many places
where he had never been before

because we have only a handful of good poems,
so we read the same ones time after time,
if only to please the crowd,

and the poems come and go,
repeating like the painted animals
on a carousel, only without the up-and-down music.

And the audiences watch them go by,
the oatmeal poem coming around again
and one about a man in a hammock,
and a poem with an uncle in a single-engine plane.

And here’s the white horse again
with the orange plume and the wooden teeth,
as all the decorative little mirrors make their rounds.

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Billy Collins’ forthcoming book is Water, Water. He is a former United States Poet Laureate and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.