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I think the pleasure of form is that you have a companion with you besides all the poetry you have ever read.

Billy Collins

I can’t picture myself starting out aiming to do anything or having much of an agenda.I think in writing a poem, I’m making some tonal adjustments, and it took me a long time to allow anything like fun into my poetry.
BILLY COLLINS

Fun Thinking Writing
I try to presume that no one is interested in me. And I think experience bears that out. No one’s interested in the experiences of a stranger – let’s put it that way. And then you have difficulty combined with presumptuousness, which is the most dire trouble with poetry.
BILLY COLLINS

Combined Experience Poetry Stranger
High School is the place where poetry goes to die.
BILLY COLLINS

Dies High School
I was a pretty happy kid, I had to fake it. I had to get into this miserable character before I wrote poems.
BILLY COLLINS

Character Happy Kid Kids
So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.
BILLY COLLINS

Heart Names Wall
I’m a line-maker. I think that’s what makes poets different from prose-writers. That’s the main way. We think, not just in sentences the way prose writers do but also in lines. So we’re doing these two things at the same time.
BILLY COLLINS

Different Thinking Two
The name of the author is the first to go followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion,
BILLY COLLINS

Conclusion Fishing Memories Novel Phones
But I think you could also put it a different way. You, quote, find your voice, unquote, when you are able to invent this one character who resembles you, obviously, and probably is more like you than anyone else on earth, but is not the equivalent to you.
BILLY COLLINS

Different Obviously Probably Unquote Way
The literary world is so full of pretension, and there’s such an enormous gap between how seriously poets take themselves and how widely they’re ignored by everybody else.
BILLY COLLINS

Gaps Ignored Poet Themselves World
Listeners are kind of ambushed… if a poem just happens to be said when they’re listening to the radio. The listener doesn’t have time to deploy what I call their ‘poetry deflector shields’ that were installed in high school – there’s little time to resist the poem.
BILLY COLLINS

Listening Radio School
There’s a lot of unconscious activity that goes on I think in the composition of a poem.
BILLY COLLINS

Goes On Thinking Unconscious
The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is, ‘What happens to the reader once he or she gets inside the poem?’
BILLY COLLINS

Poem Real Thinking Writing
I could look at you forever and never see the two of us together
BILLY COLLINS

Forever Together Two
I see woefully obscure poetry as simply a kind of verbal rudeness.
BILLY COLLINS

Kind Obscure Rudeness
Another trouble with poetry – and I’m gonna stop the list at two – is the presence of presumptuousness in poetry.
BILLY COLLINS

Memories Perception Two
It is as if one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the Southern Hemisphere of the brain.
BILLY COLLINS

Brain Memories Southern

I think the pleasure of form is that you have a companion with you besides all the poetry you have ever read.

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I think the pleasure of form is that you have a companion with you besides all the poetry you have ever read.

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