Poet Billy Collins appeared for a poetry reading Wednesday at the Memorial Union Theatre, speaking on heartbreak, the war on Iraq and the texture of his poems.

Collins, a professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York, has served as United States Poet Laureate since June 2001. He has also served as poetry consultant to the United States Library of Congress.

Collins has authored a total of seven poetry collections, his most recent being “Sailing Around the Room.”

After his thoughtful and lightly humorous reading, the audience was invited to ask him questions. During the ensuing discussion, he described how he started writing poems.

“I think you start writing poems because you read other poems,” Collins said. “I think you start reading poems and you get jealous.”

“I started writing more seriously, too seriously, when I was an adolescent,” he said. This was followed by a story about getting his heart broken in eighth grade.

“I wanted to demonstrate my aesthetic superiority to her,” Collins joked.

Collins also answered a question concerning the group Poets Against the War and his cautious stance against the recent war in Iraq.

“I think to try to keep pace with current events, often you run the risk of straining your voice speaking from a platform about things you don’t know about,” Collins explained. “I was very hesitant to jump on any kind of hasty bandwagon of ‘Let’s all be against the war and we’re poets,'” Collins said. “I think Poets Against the War is like ‘Generals For the War’; it just seems to kind of go without saying.”

Jocelyn Bodden, a UW grad student, attended the event as a fan of Collins.

“His poems are usually pretty structured as far as his thoughts and words and how they’re organized on the page,” Bodden said.

Collins described his poetry as “a kind of flatness.”

“Flatness is the thing for me,” Collins said.

“I think my poetry resists singing,” Collins explained. “I try at some point in the poem to have a bit of lyrical lift.”

Some of his works Collins read included one titled “Lanyard,” in which he sincerely and humorously described the lanyards he made at camp and their insignificance as gifts to his mother when she had given him so much throughout his life.

The Friends of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries sponsored the event and also helped sponsor the Wisconsin Book Festival, which continues to run from Oct. 22-26.