Billy Collins usually starts his poems with the first line. But his most recent poem started with the last line.

"Two workmen on the house next door were talking back and forth in Spanish," said Collins, 67, in a phone interview Thursday. "Then one said in English, 'What was her name?' and the other guy was silent. I knew right away that that would be the last line of the poem ... just this mysterious woman who had been forgotten."

Named the country's Poet Laureate in 2001, Collins said that, when the librarian of Congress called and appointed him to the position, "That was probably the first time I thought I could call myself a poet."

But the world had been calling him a poet far longer. His last three collections of poems have broken sales records for poetry, and his readings are usually standing-room only.

"I tend to be out there going from podium to podium like a hummingbird a good part of the year," said Collins, an English professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York.

His new book of poetry, "Ballistics," will be out later this year.

Collins has written more than 10 books of poetry, but his first one was not published until he was in his 40s.

"Somebody once said that everybody has about 300 bad poems in you," he said. "I think I had about 700 bad poems in me. It took a while to write my way out of that."

Frost comparisons

Collins, whose work is sometimes compared to that of Robert Frost, said, "Compared to his poetry, my poetry is like a kitchen that hasn't been cleaned. His is so beautiful and flawlessly crafted, mine is slovenly in comparison."

The only apt comparison between the two, said Collins, is that "we both sold a lot of books while alive. He was certainly a teacher of mine in how to be simple and how to be complicated at the end."

In describing his own work, Collins said, "I follow a certain kind of etiquette by writing in sentences and using a fairly small palette of vocabulary and standard punctuation.

"Grammatically and syntactically, I follow the normal Strunk and White rules that govern prose," he continued, "but I'm interested in pushing the poem away from the dimension of everyday reality into some murkier territory. ... I try to get the poem pushed into places where we don't quite know where we are, but I have to start by orienting the reader."

Collins said he sees a good poem as an eye chart. "A big E that everyone can see. As you read down, you get to some part of illegibility. (The poem) makes no demands at first, making a few statements that are inarguably true -- sitting there looking at a hibiscus -- but by the middle and toward the end, we've drifted into much more mysterious and complex and tricky waters.

"I want to start as a kind of reliable, friendly narrator and end up being cagey or unreliable or hard to figure out," he said.

Starting point

While Collins does keep a journal, his poems are usually written in one sitting. "If you get hit by something, it could be 20 minutes or three or four hours, but I usually don't know where I'm going."

Still, there's always a plan, a kernel of something in his mind. "I never sit down with nothing on my mind," he said. "Usually, there's a trigger of a poem and that's something you observe and a little phrase or a bit of conversation."

Collins said he often tells workshop students that a good way to start a poem is the back story of why they're even writing the poem. "A lot of poems ... by the time you write the first line, a lot has been felt and thought that the reader is not in on," he said. "And to kind of counter the whole presumptuousness of writing it, many (of mine) start with circumstances of the composition."

That's what happened in "The Lanyard," in which Collins muses on a boy making a lanyard for his mother at camp. In the poem, he talked about coming upon the word "lanyard" in the dictionary.

"I quickly realized this would be a way in to this big subject of gratitude to your parents," he said. "You don't want to just start with your mother. It's too big, too daunting a subject. At one point, I come to that irony where she gave me all these wonderful things and I gave her this crummy lanyard."

But once he had finished the poem, Collins didn't like it. "I was actually going to throw the poem away," he said. But he showed it to a friend who suggested he read it at a reading. "There was a strong feeling -- it seems to affect a lot of people." Collins gradually came to like the poem.

The fact that Collins showed the initial poem to someone was unusual for him. "I really don't show my poems to any other poets," he said. "I think it's probably because when I started writing, workshops didn't exist. Creative writing wasn't the industry it is now. I have never taken a workshop. I have never sent a manuscript to another poet and asked for their advice. It (poetry) seemed to be something you did in absolute solitude -- that's why I was attracted.

"I'm miffed when I pick up a manuscript of poems and he thanks eight different poets for their help," said Collins. "It becomes a sewing circle. I'm my own reader."

'Back to zero'

Collins' start as a poet came in high school, when his father brought home some copies of Poetry magazine from his office. "For the first time, I started hearing what poetry sounded like in the '50s," he said. "In school I was reading 19th-century poetry, by Longfellow and those guys. I began to imitate what I was reading."

But, for many years, Collins said he couldn't write a poem longer than about seven lines.

"I was a little too witty, too clever, smart-alecky," he said, "and the poem would kind of shut down quickly, with a quick clever ending."

Collins said a friend once described his poetry-writing style as starting out like his father but turning into his mother. His father "was very witty and sarcastic and caustic, and my mother was quite open emotionally," said Collins. "It took me a long time to get more feeling in the poem and get some kind of mix of irony and feelings."

Collins said he takes his career one poem at a time, with no long- term vision in mind.

"Poets return to zero much more frequently than other writers," he said. "A novel can take a year or two years, but a lyric poem can be written in a few hours and then you're back to zero. You have to hit restart much more frequently."

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