I hope the poem, as it goes on, gets more complicated, a little more demanding, a little more ambiguous or speculative, so that we’re drifting away from the casual beginning of the poem into something a little more serious.
BILLY COLLINSWhile the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.
More Billy Collins Quotes
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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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High School is the place where poetry goes to die.
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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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The 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.
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The really authentic thing about humor is that anyone can pretend to be serious. Anyone who’s ever had a job – in fact, we’re pretending to be serious now, more or less.
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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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Death is what makes life fun.
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Clarity is certainly a way toward disorientation because if you don’t start out – if the reader isn’t grounded, if the reader is disoriented in the beginning of the poem, then the reader can’t be led astray or disoriented later.
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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 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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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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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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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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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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To write poetry is to be very alone, but you always have the company of your influences. But you also have the company of the form itself, which has a kind of consciousness.
BILLY COLLINS