When I began to dare to be clear, because 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 COLLINSThe first line is the DNA of the poem; the rest of the poem is constructed out of that first line. A lot of it has to do with tone because tone is the key signature for the poem. The basis of trust for a reader used to be meter and end-rhyme.
More Billy Collins Quotes
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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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Form is any aspect of a poem that encourages it to stay whole and not drift off into chaos.
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I have one of these early memories where I’m in the back of my parents’ car, a place I loved to spend a lot of time as an only child, not having to fight with venomous siblings over the only toy.
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In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.
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Bugs Bunny is my muse.
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You either continue to write puerile bilge, or you change. In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.
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I saw him looking up at her and what she was doing the way the eyes of saints are painted when they are looking up at God when he is doing something remarkable, something that identifies him as God.
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So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.
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It’s a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life.
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There’s a lot of unconscious activity that goes on I think in the composition of a poem.
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Usually the poems are written in one sitting. There’s always a groping towards some satisfying ending. But I’d say the hardest part is not writing. Once the writing starts, it’s too pleasurable to think of it as a difficulty.
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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?’
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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.
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The literary world is so full of pretension, and there’s such an enormous gap between how seriously poets take themselves and how widely they’re ignored by everybody else.
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A motto I’ve adopted is, if at first you don’t succeed, hide all evidence that you ever tried.
BILLY COLLINS