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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.

Billy Collins

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.
BILLY COLLINS

Easy Person Roles Simple Understand
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.
BILLY COLLINS

Believe Poet Reading School Started
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

Doors Notebook Writing
There are just long gaps where I can’t find a point of insertion, I can’t find a good opening line.
BILLY COLLINS

Air Fall Insertion Open Time Writing
There’s a lot of unconscious activity that goes on I think in the composition of a poem.
BILLY COLLINS

Goes On Thinking Unconscious
And the reason I am writing this on the back of a manila envelope now that they have left the train together is to tell you that when she turned to lift the large, delicate cello onto the overhead rack.
BILLY COLLINS

Eye Left Overhead Rack Tell Together Writing
I could look at you forever and never see the two of us together
BILLY COLLINS

Forever Together Two
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
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
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’s a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life.
BILLY COLLINS

Good Life Public Shelves Things
You either continue to write puerile bilge, or you change. In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.
BILLY COLLINS

Simplifying Thing Voice
I see woefully obscure poetry as simply a kind of verbal rudeness.
BILLY COLLINS

Kind Obscure Rudeness
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.
BILLY COLLINS

Listening Radio School
The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is, ‘What happens to the reader once he or she gets inside the poem?’
BILLY COLLINS

Poem Real Thinking Writing
I was able to read poets that were – allowed me to be humorous without being silly.
BILLY COLLINS

Able Humorous Silly

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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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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