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When you get a poem [in a public place], it happens to you so suddenly that you don’t have time to deploy your anti-poetry deflector shields that were installed in high school.

Billy Collins

More often than not in poetry I find difficulty to be gratuitous and show-offy and camouflaging, experimental to a kind of insane degree – a difficulty which really ignores the possibility of having a sensible reader.
BILLY COLLINS

Degrees Experimental Insane Kind More Often
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
There’s a lot of unconscious activity that goes on I think in the composition of a poem.
BILLY COLLINS

Goes On Thinking Unconscious
Particularly when I thought of myself as a Wallace Stevens acolyte, I wrote very difficult poetry and I was really guilty of not knowing what I was talking about. I was going for a kind of clever verbal effect. I was trying to sound linguistically or verbally interesting.
BILLY COLLINS

Clever Reading Talking
Now I would say at any given moment in American life, there are probably 45 poets in airplanes vectoring across the country heading towards…
BILLY COLLINS

Across Airplane Country Reading Towards
It’s a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life.
BILLY COLLINS

Good Life Public Shelves Things
When I began to dare to be clear, because I think clarity is the real risk in poetry because you are exposed. You’re out in the open field. You’re actually saying things that are comprehensible, and it’s easy to criticize something you can understand.
BILLY COLLINS

Comprehensible Exposed Real Risk Saying Thinking
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
Form is any aspect of a poem that encourages it to stay whole and not drift off into chaos.
BILLY COLLINS

Aspect Chaos Form
I’m just writing, trying to write in a fairly quiet tone to one other reader who is by herself, or himself, and I’m trying to interrupt some silence in their life, which is utterance.
BILLY COLLINS

Himself Interrupt Other Reader Utterance
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.
BILLY COLLINS

Circles Light Reading
I think more influential than Emily Dickinson or Coleridge or Wordsworth on my imagination were Warner Brothers, Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes cartoons.
BILLY COLLINS

Brother Cartoon Creativity Thinking Wordsworth
Poetry is like standing on the edge of a lake on a moonlit night and the light of the moon is always pointing straight at you.
BILLY COLLINS

Lakes Moon Night Pointing
Radio is such a perfect medium for the transmission of poetry, primarily because there just is the voice, there’s no visual distraction.
BILLY COLLINS

Distraction Perfect Primarily Radio Voice
I’m very conscious of the fact that every line should have a cadence to it. It should contribute to the progress of the poem. And that the ending of the line is a way of turning the reader’s attention back into the interior of the poem.
BILLY COLLINS

Attention Conscious Poem Progress
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

When you get a poem [in a public place], it happens to you so suddenly that you don’t have time to deploy your anti-poetry deflector shields that were installed in high school.

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When you get a poem [in a public place], it happens to you so suddenly that you don’t have time to deploy your anti-poetry deflector shields that were installed in high school.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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