I was an only child, a very late child, born to parents who were both 39 at the time, which was very late back then. That kind of confirmed my sense of being the center of the universe, which I guess every child feels – children and poets both tend to feel.
BILLY COLLINSI thought originally when I was in school and I wanted to be a poet, I knew that poets seemed to be miserable.
More Billy Collins Quotes
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I write two lines or three lines. I will immediately stop and turn into a reader instead of a writer, and I’ll read those lines as if I had never seen them before and as if I had never written them.
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I’m just writing, trying to write in a fairly quiet tone to one other reader who is by herself, or himself, and I’m trying to interrupt some silence in their life, which is utterance.
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Humor is just an ingredient. It’s always been in poetry. It kind of dropped out of poetry I think during the 19th and up to the mid-twentieth century. But it’s found its way back. And it’s simply an ingredient.
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The entire novel which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of, as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain, to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
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I knew that poets seemed to be miserable.
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I’m speaking to someone I’m trying to get to fall in love with me. I’m trying to speak intimately to one person. That should be clear. I’m not speaking to an audience. I’m not writing for the podium.
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…balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found.
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Every Day Is for the Thief is a vivid, episodic evocation of the truism that you can’t go home again; but that doesn’t mean you’re not free to try.
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I see the progress typical in some of my poems as starting with something simple and moving into something more demanding. This is certainly the pattern of weird poetry.
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When you get a poem [in a public place], it happens to you so suddenly that you don’t have time to deploy your anti-poetry deflector shields that were installed in high school.
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But my heart is always propped up in a field on its tripod, ready for the next arrow.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I think clarity is the real risk in poetry because you are exposed. You’re out in the open field. You’re actually saying things that are comprehensible, and it’s easy to criticize something you can understand.
BILLY COLLINS