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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

I thought I would be completely content if I was recognized at some later point in my life as a third-rate Wallace Stevens.
BILLY COLLINS

Life People Poet Popular Recognized Thought
The name of the author is the first to go followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion,
BILLY COLLINS

Conclusion Fishing Memories Novel Phones
High School is the place where poetry goes to die.
BILLY COLLINS

Dies High School
My poems could easily evaporate. So I don’t know. If you find yourself as a writer thinking about posterity you should probably go out for a brisk walk or something.
BILLY COLLINS

Poem Posterity Something Thinking Walk
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
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
One of the ridiculous aspects of being a poet is the huge gulf between how seriously we take ourselves and how generally we are ignored by everybody else.
BILLY COLLINS

Differences Everybody Poetry Self
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
This love for everyday things, part natural from the wide eye of Infancy, part a literary calculation
BILLY COLLINS

Day Every Eye Natural Things
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
To write poetry is to be very alone, but you always have the company of your influences. But you also have the company of the form itself, which has a kind of consciousness.
BILLY COLLINS

Consciousness Lines Mean Writing
Form is any aspect of a poem that encourages it to stay whole and not drift off into chaos.
BILLY COLLINS

Aspect Chaos Form
(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
I have one of these early memories where I’m in the back of my parents’ car, a place I loved to spend a lot of time as an only child, not having to fight with venomous siblings over the only toy.
BILLY COLLINS

Child Early Memories Parents Time Venomous
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
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

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

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