(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.
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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There’s a lot of unconscious activity that goes on I think in the composition of a poem.
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While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.
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It’s time to float on the waters of the night. Time to wrap my arms around this book and press it to my chest, life preserver in a seat of unremarkable men and women anonymous faces on the street, a hundred thousand unalphabitized things a million forgotten hours.
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There are just long gaps where I can’t find a point of insertion, I can’t find a good opening line.
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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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I can hear the library humming in the night, a choir of authors murmuring inside their books along the unlit, alphabetical shelves, Giovanni Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son, each one stitched into his own private coat, together forming a low, gigantic chord of language.
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Nationalism is a type of insanity in which the boundaries of a land replace God.
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All they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with a rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.
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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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A return to his native Nigeria plunges Cole’s charming narrator into a tempest of chaos, contradiction, and kinship in a place both endearingly familiar and unnervingly strange. The result is a tale that engages and disturbs.
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I felt at some point that I had nothing to lose, and [laughs] maybe I was wrong. I think, you know, there’s always these little autobiographical secrets behind things. I think I was really attacking my earlier self, and this kind of pretentious figure.
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…balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found.
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I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author’s name on the shore. But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.
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That’s the real question for me, is getting the reader into the poem and then taking the reader somewhere, because I think of poetry as a kind of form of travel writing.
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Some difficulty is warranted and other difficulty I think is gratuitous. And I think I can tell the difference. There are certainly very difficult poets that I really enjoy reading.
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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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The mind can be trained to relieve itself on paper.
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I knew that poets seemed to be miserable.
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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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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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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.
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I see woefully obscure poetry as simply a kind of verbal rudeness.
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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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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.
BILLY COLLINS -
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 -
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.
BILLY COLLINS