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SPRINGFIELD — His first name is not William, nor even Bill, but Billy, bringing to mind a rookie shortstop digging into the batter's box rather than the cliched figure of a self-absorbed poet lurching painfully toward the abyss.

That's appropriate.

The poetry with which Billy Collins has made his name invariably begins with its feet firmly planted in the common American experience.

The nation's poet laureate from 2001-03, Collins will read selections of his eight books of popular and critically-acclaimed works at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 12, in Bayley Auditorium of Wittenberg University's Barbara Deer Kuss Science Center.

The presentation is part of the Witt Series, and admission is free.

Much the same as other poets, Collins' goal is to take his readers to the mystical and sometimes strange border region where language interacts with meaning in unpredictable ways.

But his plain spoken style, as comforting as a National Parks tour guide in a Smoky Bear hat, makes him feel like a trusted guide to that wilderness.

Not only does Collins' poetry look more like prose than poetry, it always begins in the prosaic world.

In a phone interview last week, the poet likened the openings of his poems to a "You Are Here" arrow on a map at shopping mall.

This tactic, he said, accomplishes a few things: It connects with the reader in the real world, makes Collins bored enough to want to move on, and serves as a point of reference that makes the reader feel all the stranger to be catapulted by poetry "into another dimension."

Asked to describe the process that helps him reach that goal, Collins reached for the deadpan that often appears in his poetic persona: "It's called groping."

"People like to talk about craft in poetry," he said. "It occurred to me (recently) that craft is looking for the next line."

And as he moves from line to line, Collins said he strives to keep a line open to his audience.

"I actually become the reader when I'm writing," he said. "I test every line or every stanza. I look at what I'm just written with an attempted objectivity."

The point is to "establish an intimacy" with the reader at the outset and maintain that intimacy to a poem's end.

The ultimate goal of his poetry?

"I think truth's too heavy" an expectation, Collins said. "I'm paddling toward a revelation," he said, for which he then ventured a fair definition.

"It's quite magical the way a group of words can access imaginative realms or levels of insight," Collins said. "We feel we've been transported."

As a result, "the reader feels a little left off" at poem's end, he said — removed enough from everyday reality to feel the sense of being lost in the mid way, "looking for your parents at the county fair."

Those who read Collins' books of poetry, of course, have a simple way of dispatching with that feeling.

At the top of the next page, a friendly man named Billy, dressed like a National Parks tour guide, is standing next to a mall map that says "You Are Here."

(Collins' appearance is dedicated to the memory of Allen Kopenhaver, a poetry lover and Wittenberg English professor from 1961 to 1991.)

Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368 or tstafford@coxohio.com