Great Regulars: Billy Collins: Not just on demand but

on something so big. You know some of my poems. My poems are about little things. They're about whether the salt and pepper shakers get along, you know, and that kind of stuff, walking the dog. They're not about geopolitical trauma, and I said I'll certainly show up. You can't just say I'm busy to Congress, but I thought at the time I would find something to read by another poet. In the back of my mind I thought probably Whitman. Anyway, a few weeks went by and one morning I woke up at 5 in the morning, early for me, and I just thought, you should give this try, you're copping out here, get off the bench. And so two things passed through my mind: One was that I could write an elegy, a poem for the dead. So I had the genre of the elegy.

from Jeffrey Brown: PBS: Newshour: Preview of 'America Remembers 9/11': Reading by Poets Billy Collins, Nancy Mercado
then PBS: Poet Billy Collins Reflects on 9/11 Victims in 'The Names'
then PBS: New Yorker, Poet Nancy Mercado Reads 'Going to Work'

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