Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins was on our KQED Forum last week to discuss his new anthology, Horoscopes of the Dead.

Afterwards, KQED News Interactive Producer Amanda Stupi asked him what he thought, as a poet, of social media. The conversation then turned to the representation of poetry in electronic form.

“A poem is a piece of sculpture in words,” Collins said. Mess around with the typeface or the line breaks, and some poems will become “unrecognizable.”

On a New York Times assignment to write a Twitter poem, an experience he called identical to trying to write a sonnet:

Video: Poet Billy Collins on Social Media, Twitter, and Poetry