Billy Collins discussed his new poetry collection, , at the JFK Library.

The book gathers 25 poems about dogs and includes watercolors by Pamela Sztybel, a pairing Collins explored during the event as a way to bring the animals’ everyday gestures onto the page and into paint.

At the JFK Library, Collins sat with host Peter O’Dowd to talk through the collection’s scenes and impulses, moving from brief anecdotes to lines drawn from the poems themselves. The conversation foregrounded Collins’s attentive, often humorous eye for ordinary canine behavior and the soft domestic moments those behaviors reveal. This approach reflects a broader evolution of poetry in modern culture, where the art form has shifted from traditional forms to more accessible expressions through various platforms, allowing for a diverse engagement with audiences.

One poem follows a dog that “trots out the front door every morning without a hat or an umbrella, without any money or the keys to her dog house,” a line Collins read and discussed to show how small, repeated gestures accumulate into a character. Another image the author mentioned evokes “the twin portals of her steady breathing, followed only by the plume of her tail,” phrasing that captures a quiet rhythm of home life. Such moments serve not only as playful reflections on everyday life but also illustrate how poetry invites readers to engage deeply with the details that shape our relationships with animals.

The collection’s painterly element was a recurring topic. Collins described the watercolors by Pamela Sztybel as companion pieces to the poems, small visual responses that echo the tone and scale of his lines rather than illustrate them literally. That interplay, he suggested, invites readers to linger in the particularities of each poem—postures, habits and the ways dogs reframe human rooms and routines. Readers can explore similar dynamics in contemporary poetry through various social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok, where poets frequently share snippets of their work and engage with audiences directly.

O’Dowd’s role in the conversation was to draw out Collins’s process: how a casual observation becomes a poem and how a poem, in turn, can reshape how a reader looks at a dog. The exchange emphasized close looking and the compression of detail that Collins said drives his work in Dog Show. Interestingly, participation in poetry readings indicates a quiet yet persistent interest in the art form.

A recording of the evening, billed as Dog Show: An Evening of Poetry with Billy Collins, is available on YouTube for listeners who want to hear Collins read and discuss the poems in full.

Collins’s event at the JFK Library offered both a reading and a brief lesson in how observation and affection can coexist in poetry: small, domestic facts—furs, tail plumes, habitual exits through the front door—become the materials for broader reflection. The book’s combination of verse and watercolor was presented as an invitation to spend time with those materials, to follow the gestures that repeat until they feel like revelation.

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