The pen is an instrument of discovery rather than just a recording implement. If you write a letter of resignation or something with an agenda, you’re simply using a pen to record what you have thought out.
BILLY COLLINSHumor is just an ingredient. It’s always been in poetry. It kind of dropped out of poetry I think during the 19th and up to the mid-twentieth century. But it’s found its way back. And it’s simply an ingredient.
More Billy Collins Quotes
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No one here likes a wet dog.
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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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I had a sense, I guess, from just reading a lot of poetry of how a poem would start and how it would end but really I didn’t know what I was doing. It had very little connection to my life.
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I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves, straining in circles of light to find more light until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs that we follow across a page of fresh snow.
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I see the progress typical in some of my poems as starting with something simple and moving into something more demanding. This is certainly the pattern of weird poetry.
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I don’t know if anyone’s reading it, but poets are still flying around the country going from lectern to lectern.That circuitry has become very well-established.
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Humor, for me, is really a gate of departure. Its a way of enticing a reader into a poem so that less funny things can take place later. It really is not an end in itself, but a means to an end.
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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.
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I thought originally when I was in school and I wanted to be a poet, I knew that poets seemed to be miserable.
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It’s a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life.
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I think my work has to do with a sense that we are attempting, all the time, to create a logical, rational path through the day. To the left and right there are an amazing set of distractions that we usually can’t afford to follow. But the poet is willing to stop anywhere.
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Introduction To Poetry I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem’s room and feel the walls for a light switch.
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Form is any aspect of a poem that encourages it to stay whole and not drift off into chaos.
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It’s time to float on the waters of the night. Time to wrap my arms around this book and press it to my chest, life preserver in a seat of unremarkable men and women anonymous faces on the street, a hundred thousand unalphabitized things a million forgotten hours.
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I stared up at the ebbing quarter moon and the stars scattered like a handful of salt across the faraway sky.
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There are just long gaps where I can’t find a point of insertion, I can’t find a good opening line.
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Another trouble with poetry – and I’m gonna stop the list at two – is the presence of presumptuousness in poetry.
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The really authentic thing about humor is that anyone can pretend to be serious. Anyone who’s ever had a job – in fact, we’re pretending to be serious now, more or less.
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I hope the poem, as it goes on, gets more complicated, a little more demanding, a little more ambiguous or speculative, so that we’re drifting away from the casual beginning of the poem into something a little more serious.
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I always think W.S. Merwin’s poems will last of anyone writing today. If I had to bet on posterity I would bet Merwin.
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It is as if one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the Southern Hemisphere of the brain.
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But some nights, I must tell you, I go down there after everyone has fallen asleep. I swim back and forth in the echoing blackness. I sing a love song as well as I can, lost for a while in the home of the rain.
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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.
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I felt at some point that I had nothing to lose, and [laughs] maybe I was wrong. I think, you know, there’s always these little autobiographical secrets behind things. I think I was really attacking my earlier self, and this kind of pretentious figure.
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Clarity is certainly a way toward disorientation because if you don’t start out – if the reader isn’t grounded, if the reader is disoriented in the beginning of the poem, then the reader can’t be led astray or disoriented later.
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Robert Frost really started this whole thing rolling. He was, I believe, the first poet who started going to colleges. Before that, poets didn’t give public readings very often, certainly not – there was no circuit of schools.
BILLY COLLINS