By HILLEL ITALIE
Associated Press Writer

BEARSVILLE, N.Y. (AP) -- Hundreds of people are arriving for the final day of the first annual Woodstock Poetry Festival. They have come to hear Billy Collins, America's new poet laureate. Outside, the sun shines to perfection, as a veritable song seeking praise from the guest of honor.

But by the time Collins is introduced--loud applause and a few hoots and hollers--like any other opening act. The sun does not shine on this stage; Collins instead serves up an ode to a mouse in his house.

Who could sleep that night?

Who could whisk away the thought

of the one unlikely mouse

padding along a cold water pipe.

Bald and slightly built, his dry, droll manner a reminder of Kevin Spacey, the 60-year-old Collins is no bewigged poet of pen and quill. He's a modern man, dressed in denim. He's modest, too, joking about his new job (``Now, my opinion is valued''), and his own work (``Almost completely lacking in development over the years.'')

Versed in both classic texts and contemporary slang, Collins belongs to a seemingly endangered species--the popular poet. As Collins himself knows well, his last three books have sold some 100,000 copies, a substantial figure for poetry, even more so since he was published by the small University of Pittsburgh Press.

He received a six-figure advance to sign with Random House and his new book, ``Sailing Alone Around the World,'' which has already sold out a 35,000 first printing. Ten thousand copies were sold in June, the month in which he was named poet laureate by the Library of Congress.

When Collins is praised, as he often is, a certain word keeps appearing: ``accessible.'' For example, in announcing his appointment as poet laureate, the library noted: ``He is accessible.'' The chair of the English department at Lehman College in New York City, where Collins teaches, has defined his poetry as ``accessible to all willing to follow him.''

But Collins is not necessarily flattered. Being called ``accessible'' is something he both fears and aspires to, and comparing it to a girl endlessly labeled ``cute.''

``Anybody can write an accessible poem,'' says Collins, seated in an upstairs office at an art gallery in downtown Woodstock. ``It's what happens when a reader gets inside the poem that's important. Accessible is a device to lure the reader into the poem, where much less accessible things happen.''

Collins' poems are mostly just a page or two, written in a direct, humorous, intimate style. He writes in a post-allegorical world, of love and not of Love.

There are no ancient muses to summon, no gods to thank. The eternal resides in more ``accessible'' stuff: mice, parsley, a wheelbarrow, some Irish cows.

When he refers to old poets and classical times, it is often to note that those days are gone:

We do not speak like Petrarch or wear a hat like Spenser

and it is not fourteen lines

like furrows in a small, carefully plowed field

but the picture postcard, a poem on vacation,

that forces us to sing our songs in little rooms

or pour our sentiments into measuring cups.

A native New Yorker, Collins didn't bother much with poetry as a child. He read plenty of fiction, but Collins' first artistic epiphany arrived in the form of jazz, still a favorite subject of his work. He was around 13, working at his uncle's lakeside hotel in Ontario.

``I was mowing a lawn... and a speedboat pulled into the dock with these two very strange-looking couples... one of the guys had a goatee,'' recalls Collins, who now lives in suburban Somers, N.Y.

``And they set up a kind of phonograph or something on the dock, and they stayed there for a couple of days. They sat around drinking wine and eating and listening to this music. It was Benny Goodman's Carnegie Hall performance that they kept playing. It was the first time I heard jazz and I was completely hooked.''

But Collins' talent was for poetry, not jazz. Although a bit of a beatnik in his younger days, he followed a traditional academic path: English major at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., a Ph.D from the University of California at Riverside, a longtime teaching position at Lehman College.

``One of my colleagues... summed it up succinctly,'' said Collins, whose one-year term in Washington, D.C., begins this fall. ``When she first knew me, I was a professor who happened to be a poet. Now, I'm a poet who happens to be a professor.''

The role, and the title, of America's official poet has changed over time. From 1937 to 1986, appointees were named ``Consultant in Poetry,'' as if iambic pentameter were a matter of state. They did little more than perform official functions, such as presiding over readings in Washington.

While the position was renamed to the more artistic ``Poet Laureate'' in 1987, it initially remained private and ceremonial. But over the past decade incumbents have become public figures, missionaries of verse.

Collins is an experienced teacher and public reader who plans to build on his predecessors' efforts. He outlines a project called ``Poetry 180,'' named for the estimated number of school days in a given year. The idea is that a different poem will be read in high schools each day.

``There are poems that students can get on the first reading. There are also poems high school students would have no trouble relating to--open-ended, hospitable, sometimes funny poems,'' he says.

``I want to discourage English teachers from discussing the poem, analyzing it. The poem is not going to be on the midterm.... It's not just something you study in English class, but it's something that's a feature of daily life.''

Previous laureates warn that they spent more time talking about poetry than actually writing it. Richard Wilbur, who served in 1987-88 recalls he didn't get much done. ``The most important thing in my life, I was doing a little too little of.''

Collins breaks this mtyh with a poem inspried by his new job, ``The Library of Congress,'' inspired by a trip to the library building in Washington, where he noticed an enormous clock adorned by Father Time and two nubile nymphs.

I have begun to pray

to some vague god,

to Mother Goose,

to Sister Superior

or whatever saint or genii will listen,

to please make Father Time

set down on the ground

gently enough so as not to crack it,

the hourglass he is holding

in one hand,

and then the scythe he is holding in the other.

to take a break, in other words,

from the sovereignty of bronze

to look this way and that

and to see to his surprise

the two bare-breasted female figures

who have always been there, right by his side.