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This love for everyday things, part natural from the wide eye of Infancy, part a literary calculation

Billy Collins

Vade Mecum I want the scissors to be sharp and the table perfectly level when you cut me out of my life and paste me in that book you always carry.
BILLY COLLINS

Book Cutting Levels Life Scissors
While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.
BILLY COLLINS

Novelists Poet Typewriters
I’m very conscious of the fact that every line should have a cadence to it. It should contribute to the progress of the poem. And that the ending of the line is a way of turning the reader’s attention back into the interior of the poem.
BILLY COLLINS

Attention Conscious Poem Progress
…balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found.
BILLY COLLINS

Lost Needs Wish
I think my poems are slightly underrated by the word accessible.
BILLY COLLINS

Accessible Poems Thinking Underrated
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.
BILLY COLLINS

Listening Radio School
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?’
BILLY COLLINS

Poem Real Thinking Writing
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
It’s a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life.
BILLY COLLINS

Good Life Public Shelves Things
As soon as I start to write I’m very aware, I’m trying to be aware that a reader just might well pick up this poem, a stranger. So when I’m writing – and I think that this is important for all writers – I’m trying to be a writer and a reader back and forth.
BILLY COLLINS

Aware Stranger Thinking Trying Two Writing
Particularly when I thought of myself as a Wallace Stevens acolyte, I wrote very difficult poetry and I was really guilty of not knowing what I was talking about. I was going for a kind of clever verbal effect. I was trying to sound linguistically or verbally interesting.
BILLY COLLINS

Clever Reading Talking
The name of the author is the first to go followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion,
BILLY COLLINS

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

Goes On Thinking Unconscious
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.
BILLY COLLINS

Doors Notebook Writing
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
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.
BILLY COLLINS

Arms Book Men Night Preserve Press

This love for everyday things, part natural from the wide eye of Infancy, part a literary calculation

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This love for everyday things, part natural from the wide eye of Infancy, part a literary calculation

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