“I’m in Florida but not of Florida,” the 81-year-old poet Billy Collins likes to say of the state where “woke goes to die.”
When Billy Collins tells his New York City friends that he moved to Winter Park, Florida, they give him looks. “Florida has a very strong stigma right now,” Collins, a former Poet Laureate of both the U.S. and New York State, said the other day. “Ron DeSantis has reached a new level of trespass and overstepping.” He went on, “But I don’t wake up in the morning and think about the governor and what college boards he’s changing or what books he’s banning.
He greeted an elderly schnauzer. The owner told Collins that the dog was named Pretzels, and added, “My partner loves your work.” But mostly Collins was invisible. He passed three students, all looking at phones, and felt no inspirational spark. He passed the chapel at Rollins College, where he once interviewed Paul McCartney onstage.
“My editor thought it was an interesting new direction in my artistic career,” he said of his decision to fill a book with poems that are more or less haiku length. “But I feared it was the beginning of the end, with my poems getting shorter and shorter because I’m out of gas.”
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