I think the pleasure of form is that you have a companion with you besides all the poetry you have ever read.
BILLY COLLINSBugs Bunny is my muse.
More Billy Collins Quotes
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(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 -
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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High School is the place where poetry goes to die.
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I thought originally when I was in school and I wanted to be a poet, I knew that poets seemed to be miserable.
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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 -
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.
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I could feel the day offering itself to me, and I wanted nothing more than to be in the moment-but which moment? Not that one, or that one, or that one.
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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.
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Nationalism is a type of insanity in which the boundaries of a land replace God.
BILLY COLLINS -
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 -
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 -
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.
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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.
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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.
BILLY COLLINS -
I think my poems are slightly underrated by the word accessible.
BILLY COLLINS