But my heart is always propped up in a field on its tripod, ready for the next arrow.
BILLY COLLINSNow I would say at any given moment in American life, there are probably 45 poets in airplanes vectoring across the country heading towards…
More Billy Collins Quotes
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In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.
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Humor 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.
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It’s a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life.
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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.
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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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The entire novel which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of, as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain, to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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The name of the author is the first to go followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion,
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While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.
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I write two lines or three lines. I will immediately stop and turn into a reader instead of a writer, and I’ll read those lines as if I had never seen them before and as if I had never written them.
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High School is the place where poetry goes to die.
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I thought I would be completely content if I was recognized at some later point in my life as a third-rate Wallace Stevens.
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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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When I wrote I took on the role of the despondent and difficult to understand person. Whereas in life, I was easy to understand, to the point of being simple-minded maybe.
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The great thing about the game of poetry is that it’s always your turn – I guess that goes back to my being an only child. So once it’s under way, there is a sense of flow.
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A motto I’ve adopted is, if at first you don’t succeed, hide all evidence that you ever tried.
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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.
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The first line is the DNA of the poem; the rest of the poem is constructed out of that first line. A lot of it has to do with tone because tone is the key signature for the poem. The basis of trust for a reader used to be meter and end-rhyme.
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I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author’s name on the shore. But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.
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I was able to read poets that were – allowed me to be humorous without being silly.
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Now I would say at any given moment in American life, there are probably 45 poets in airplanes vectoring across the country heading towards…
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Bugs Bunny is my muse.
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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.
BILLY COLLINS