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 COLLINSThis love for everyday things, part natural from the wide eye of Infancy, part a literary calculation
More Billy Collins Quotes
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…balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found.
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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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Now I would say at any given moment in American life, there are probably 45 poets in airplanes vectoring across the country heading towards…
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More often than not in poetry I find difficulty to be gratuitous and show-offy and camouflaging, experimental to a kind of insane degree – a difficulty which really ignores the possibility of having a sensible reader.
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I mean, the sonnet will simply tell you, that’s too many syllables or that’s too many lines or that’s the wrong place. So, instead of being alone, you’re in dialogue with the form.
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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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Radio is such a perfect medium for the transmission of poetry, primarily because there just is the voice, there’s no visual distraction.
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Death is what makes life fun.
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I knew that poets seemed to be miserable.
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The mind can be trained to relieve itself on paper.
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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.
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I see woefully obscure poetry as simply a kind of verbal rudeness.
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I thought I would be completely content if I was recognized at some later point in my life as a third-rate Wallace Stevens.
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I think my poems are slightly underrated by the word accessible.
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You, quote, find your voice, unquote, when you are able to invent this one character who resembles you, obviously, and probably is more like you than anyone else on earth, but is not the equivalent to you.
BILLY COLLINS