![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Last month, he began his term as America's poet laureate. A decade ago, his poems were still being regularly rejected by the smallest of literary journals. Collins, 60, seems to have materialized, fully formed, out of nowhere. Collins, who charmed an audience of nearly 1,000 in September at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco. The Chicago reading may have been a whopper for the poetry center, but it was actually medium-size for Mr. ''It was one of the biggest poetry readings in the history of the center,'' said Kenneth Clarke, the center's executive director. The event was sold out a week in advance. More than 450 people paid $15 a ticket to hear him read from his latest book, ''Sailing Around the Room,'' which is on best-seller lists in Washington, San Francisco and Boston. Collins, who was raised in Jackson Heights, Queens, and teaches in the city university system at Lehman College in the Bronx, caused the literary equivalent of Beatlemania. The last time the center had invited him to read, in 1993, he had been a relatively obscure poet whose last volume, ''Questions About Angels,'' was on its way out of print. ![]() TWO weeks ago, the Poetry Center of Chicago sponsored a reading by Billy Collins at the Chicago Historical Society. ![]()
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