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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.

Billy Collins

You either continue to write puerile bilge, or you change. In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.
BILLY COLLINS

Simplifying Thing Voice
The mind can be trained to relieve itself on paper.
BILLY COLLINS

Mind Paper Relieve Trained
And the reason I am writing this on the back of a manila envelope now that they have left the train together is to tell you that when she turned to lift the large, delicate cello onto the overhead rack.
BILLY COLLINS

Eye Left Overhead Rack Tell Together Writing
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.
BILLY COLLINS

Moving Progress Simple
I think the pleasure of form is that you have a companion with you besides all the poetry you have ever read.
BILLY COLLINS

Form Pleasure Read Thinking
(Again I’m trying to give you a finite version of this career.) And then I came under the sway of Wallace Stevens when I was in college and graduate school, and basically set as a life goal the ambition of writing third-rate Wallace Stevens.
BILLY COLLINS

Ambition Basically Career Goal Graduation Version
The sense you get in a poem that the poet takes for granted an interest on the reader’s part in the poet’s autobiographical life, in the poet’s memories, problems, difficulties and even minor perceptions.
BILLY COLLINS

Autobiographical Difficulties Problem Reader
Every Day Is for the Thief is a vivid, episodic evocation of the truism that you can’t go home again; but that doesn’t mean you’re not free to try.
BILLY COLLINS

Day Every Home Mean Trying
Nationalism is a type of insanity in which the boundaries of a land replace God.
BILLY COLLINS

Boundaries Insanity Land
Vade Mecum I want the scissors to be sharp and the table perfectly level when you cut me out of my life and paste me in that book you always carry.
BILLY COLLINS

Book Cutting Levels Life Scissors
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.
BILLY COLLINS

Anyone Country Established Going Lectern
But tomorrow, dawn will come the way I picture her, barefoot and disheveled, standing outside my window in one of the fragile cotton dresses of the poor. She will look in at me with her thin arms extended, offering a handful of birdsong and a small cup of light.
BILLY COLLINS

Bird Light Offering
…balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found.
BILLY COLLINS

Lost Needs Wish
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.
BILLY COLLINS

Astray Beginning Clarity Disorientated Poem Reader
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.
BILLY COLLINS

Laughing Self Thinking
I write with a Uni-Ball Onyx Micropoint on nine-by-seven bound notebooks made by a Canadian company called Blueline. After I do a few drafts, I type up the poem on a Macintosh G3 and then send it out the door.
BILLY COLLINS

Doors Notebook Writing

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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