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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.

Billy Collins

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.
BILLY COLLINS

Arms Book Men Night Preserve Press
I thought originally when I was in school and I wanted to be a poet, I knew that poets seemed to be miserable.
BILLY COLLINS

Miserable Poet School
A return to his native Nigeria plunges Cole’s charming narrator into a tempest of chaos, contradiction, and kinship in a place both endearingly familiar and unnervingly strange. The result is a tale that engages and disturbs.
BILLY COLLINS

ContrAction Familiar Kinship Result Tempest
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.
BILLY COLLINS

Connecting Interesting Poem Poetry Sense
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

Character Earth Eqiuipvalent Resembles Voice
As soon as I start to write I’m very aware, I’m trying to be aware that a reader just might well pick up this poem, a stranger. So when I’m writing – and I think that this is important for all writers – I’m trying to be a writer and a reader back and forth.
BILLY COLLINS

Aware Stranger Thinking Trying Two 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
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.
BILLY COLLINS

Distraction Left Path Right Thinking
I mean, the sonnet will simply tell you, that’s too many syllables or that’s too many lines or that’s the wrong place. So, instead of being alone, you’re in dialogue with the form.
BILLY COLLINS

Alone Dialogue Simply Sonnet Wrong
I stared up at the ebbing quarter moon and the stars scattered like a handful of salt across the faraway sky.
BILLY COLLINS

Across Faraway Moon Sky Stars
Form is any aspect of a poem that encourages it to stay whole and not drift off into chaos.
BILLY COLLINS

Aspect Chaos Form
It seems only yesterday I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I could shine.
BILLY COLLINS

Believe Cutting Yesterday
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.
BILLY COLLINS

Mean Names Wall
There’s a lot of unconscious activity that goes on I think in the composition of a poem.
BILLY COLLINS

Goes On Thinking Unconscious
High School is the place where poetry goes to die.
BILLY COLLINS

Dies High School
That’s the real question for me, is getting the reader into the poem and then taking the reader somewhere, because I think of poetry as a kind of form of travel writing.
BILLY COLLINS

Poem Reader Talking Travel Writing

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Billy Collins Quotes