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Former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins @ USF TAMPA (WUSF) - If your mind's eye paints a poet as someone who sits around a fireplace, staring out a window into a park and writing thoughts as fleeting as the wind, you haven't met Billy Collins.

COLLINS: I spent a lot of time - wasted a lot of time - reading poetry that seemed oblivious to my presence as a reader. And I got tired of being ignored and stopped reading that kind of poetry. And stopped writing it, too. Because I thought if they were ignoring me, I would write poems that would ignore them. That attitude didn't get me anywhere. So now, I'm unashamedly interested in courting the reader and maintaining his or her interest.

A tall, balding man with a deadpan wit, Collins spoke to the crowd in a language that most could understand.

COLLINS: I was reading an article or a book or something on printing. And it was pretty slow going until I can to an article or sentence which I wrote later, and the sentence was, "It has been calculated that each copy of the Guttenburg Bible required the skins of 300 sheep." And the short poem is called "Flock." I can see them squeezed into the holding pen behind the stone building where the printing press is housed. All of them squirming around to find a little room, and looking so much alike, it would be nearly impossible to count them. And there is no telling which one will carry the news that the Lord is their shepherd, one of the few things they already know.

Collins was poet laureate of the U.S. from 2001 through 2003. He's now poet laureate of the state of New York. His last three collections of poems have broken sales records for poetry, and his readings are usually standing-room-only. There wasn't an empty seat in the Embassy Suites ballroom at USF.

After the reading, one listener referred to him as the "blue jeans poet." Tara Graves, a recent graduate from USF, got Collins to autograph her collection of his books.

GRAVES: I think we only have two of his books, but we do find him very accessible, which is something that I think has made him very popular. I think with the reading tonight, he connected with the audience.

The New York Times said of him, "Luring his readers into the poem with humor, Mr. Collins leads them unwittingly into deeper, more serious places, a kind of journey from the familiar to quirky to unexpected territory, sometimes tender, often profound."

One example of the unexpected in everyday life is his poem, "The Dead."

COLLINS: The dead are always looking down on us. They say while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich, they are looking down on their glass-bottomed boats of heaven, as they row themselves slowly through eternity. They watch the tops of heads moving below on Earth, and when we lie down on a field or on a couch, drugged perhaps by the hum of a warm afternoon, they think we are looking back at them. Which makes them lift their oars and fall silent and wait like parents for us to close our eyes.

Collins ended his reading with a poem inspired by Greek philosophers.

COLLINS:This is the end, according to Aristotle, what we have all been working for, but everything comes down to the destination we cannot help imagining, a streak of light in the sky, a hat on a peg, and outside the cabin, falling leaves. Thank you.

Collins plans to go on tour this spring with singer Mary Chapin Carpenter.

Steve Newborn, WUSF 89.7 News. © Copyright 2012, WUSF