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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.

Billy Collins

There’s a lot of unconscious activity that goes on I think in the composition of a poem.
BILLY COLLINS

Goes On Thinking Unconscious
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.
BILLY COLLINS

Dropped Found Ingriidient Poetry Simply
Now I would say at any given moment in American life, there are probably 45 poets in airplanes vectoring across the country heading towards…
BILLY COLLINS

Across Airplane Country Reading Towards
I was a pretty happy kid, I had to fake it. I had to get into this miserable character before I wrote poems.
BILLY COLLINS

Character Happy Kid Kids
This love for everyday things, part natural from the wide eye of Infancy, part a literary calculation
BILLY COLLINS

Day Every Eye Natural Things
High School is the place where poetry goes to die.
BILLY COLLINS

Dies High School
I try to presume that no one is interested in me. And I think experience bears that out. No one’s interested in the experiences of a stranger – let’s put it that way. And then you have difficulty combined with presumptuousness, which is the most dire trouble with poetry.
BILLY COLLINS

Combined Experience Poetry Stranger
The mind can be trained to relieve itself on paper.
BILLY COLLINS

Mind Paper Relieve Trained
…balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found.
BILLY COLLINS

Lost Needs Wish
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
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.
BILLY COLLINS

Decided Heard Hemisphere Memories Southern Suddenly
But some nights, I must tell you, I go down there after everyone has fallen asleep. I swim back and forth in the echoing blackness. I sing a love song as well as I can, lost for a while in the home of the rain.
BILLY COLLINS

Echoing Everyone Home Rain Song Tell
The sense you get in a poem that the poet takes for granted an interest on the reader’s part in the poet’s autobiographical life, in the poet’s memories, problems, difficulties and even minor perceptions.
BILLY COLLINS

Autobiographical Difficulties Problem Reader
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 think the pleasure of form is that you have a companion with you besides all the poetry you have ever read.
BILLY COLLINS

Form Pleasure Read Thinking
I was able to read poets that were – allowed me to be humorous without being silly.
BILLY COLLINS

Able Humorous Silly

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 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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