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About the Author
by Gary Leising
I am not
writer-in-residence at
an ivy league school
or a state college or
small land grant
institution.
My book is not available
from Norton
or Knopf or Houghton
Mifflin or the
University
of Anything Press.
However, individual
poems
have not appeared in
journals such as
Poetry,
American Poetry Review,
The New Yorker,
or
elsewhere. But a
Fulbright, the Walt
Whitman Award,
the Tufts, the William
Carlos Williams and
several other awards
named after poets
as well as the Poetry
Foundation’s Mark Twain
Prize for Humor have not
been awarded to me.
For the 2006 Best
American Poetry
volume
my poem “My Wife Will
Not Clean the Bathroom”
was not selected by
Billy Collins,
Billy Collins who did
not write me a letter of
recommendation,
Billy Collins who has
not blurbed my book,
Billy Collins who does
not return my calls or
emails (it’s
gary_leising@yahoo.com,
in case you lost it,
Billy),
Billy Collins who does
not like it when I call
him Billy,
Billy Collins sits at
his window watching
birds play with dried,
crusty, artisanal French
bread he left to attract
them to his property,
his yard, his home, to
the blank page on his
writing desk, to his
poems, where they rest
or soar, they live or
die, completely
inaccessible to the
lined legal pad in front
of me, its rectangle
unmarred by the y’s and
x’s of those birds’
endless footprints.
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