This love for everyday things, part natural from the wide eye of Infancy, part a literary calculation
BILLY COLLINSI think the pleasure of form is that you have a companion with you besides all the poetry you have ever read.
More Billy Collins Quotes
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I was able to read poets that were – allowed me to be humorous without being silly.
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You come by your style by learning what to leave out. At first you tend to overwrite—embellishment instead of insight.
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But tomorrow, dawn will come the way I picture her, barefoot and disheveled, standing outside my window in one of the fragile cotton dresses of the poor. She will look in at me with her thin arms extended, offering a handful of birdsong and a small cup of light.
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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.
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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.
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I stared up at the ebbing quarter moon and the stars scattered like a handful of salt across the faraway sky.
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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.
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So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.
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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 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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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.
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I think more influential than Emily Dickinson or Coleridge or Wordsworth on my imagination were Warner Brothers, Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes cartoons.
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In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.
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No one here likes a wet dog.
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But I think you could also put it a different way. 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