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.
BILLY COLLINSListeners 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.
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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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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It’s a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life.
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I’m a line-maker. I think that’s what makes poets different from prose-writers. That’s the main way. We think, not just in sentences the way prose writers do but also in lines. So we’re doing these two things at the same time.
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The great thing about the game of poetry is that it’s always your turn – I guess that goes back to my being an only child. So once it’s under way, there is a sense of flow.
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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.
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No one here likes a wet dog.
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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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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’t picture myself starting out aiming to do anything or having much of an agenda.I think in writing a poem, I’m making some tonal adjustments, and it took me a long time to allow anything like fun into my poetry.
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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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This love for everyday things, part natural from the wide eye of Infancy, part a literary calculation
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I’m just writing, trying to write in a fairly quiet tone to one other reader who is by herself, or himself, and I’m trying to interrupt some silence in their life, which is utterance.
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Humor, for me, is really a gate of departure. Its a way of enticing a reader into a poem so that less funny things can take place later. It really is not an end in itself, but a means to an end.
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Form is any aspect of a poem that encourages it to stay whole and not drift off into chaos.
BILLY COLLINS