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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

You come by your style by learning what to leave out. At first you tend to overwrite—embellishment instead of insight.
BILLY COLLINS

Embellishment Style Voice Writing
Bugs Bunny is my muse.
BILLY COLLINS

Bugs Bunnies Creativity
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.
BILLY COLLINS

Easy Person Roles Simple Understand
I knew that poets seemed to be miserable.
BILLY COLLINS

Miserable Poet Seemed
I thought I would be completely content if I was recognized at some later point in my life as a third-rate Wallace Stevens.
BILLY COLLINS

Life People Poet Popular Recognized Thought
I see woefully obscure poetry as simply a kind of verbal rudeness.
BILLY COLLINS

Kind Obscure Rudeness
While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.
BILLY COLLINS

Novelists Poet Typewriters
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’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.
BILLY COLLINS

Different Thinking Two
It seems only yesterday I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I could shine.
BILLY COLLINS

Believe Cutting Yesterday
But some nights, I must tell you, I go down there after everyone has fallen asleep. I swim back and forth in the echoing blackness. I sing a love song as well as I can, lost for a while in the home of the rain.
BILLY COLLINS

Echoing Everyone Home Rain Song Tell
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.
BILLY COLLINS

Dropped Found Ingriidient Poetry Simply
You either continue to write puerile bilge, or you change. In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.
BILLY COLLINS

Simplifying Thing Voice
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.
BILLY COLLINS

Differences Difficult Poet Reading Thinking
I think clarity is the real risk in poetry because you are exposed. You’re out in the open field. You’re actually saying things that are comprehensible, and it’s easy to criticize something you can understand.
BILLY COLLINS

Clarity Comprehensive Exposed Real Risk Thinking
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.
BILLY COLLINS

Constructed DNA First Keys Signatures Time

Form is any aspect of a poem that encourages it to stay whole and not drift off into chaos.

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Form is any aspect of a poem that encourages it to stay whole and not drift off into chaos.

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Popular Authors

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