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The pen is an instrument of discovery rather than just a recording implement. If you write a letter of resignation or something with an agenda, you’re simply using a pen to record what you have thought out.

Billy Collins

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
Death is what makes life fun.
BILLY COLLINS

Death Fun Life
Another trouble with poetry – and I’m gonna stop the list at two – is the presence of presumptuousness in poetry.
BILLY COLLINS

Memories Perception Two
In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.
BILLY COLLINS

Oneself Process Voice
It’s a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life.
BILLY COLLINS

Good Life Public Shelves Things
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’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.
BILLY COLLINS

Falling Love Podium Silence Writing
I think my work has to do with a sense that we are attempting, all the time, to create a logical, rational path through the day. To the left and right there are an amazing set of distractions that we usually can’t afford to follow. But the poet is willing to stop anywhere.
BILLY COLLINS

Distraction Left Path Right Thinking
I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves, straining in circles of light to find more light until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs that we follow across a page of fresh snow.
BILLY COLLINS

Circles Light Reading
No one here likes a wet dog.
BILLY COLLINS

Dogs Likes Wet
But tomorrow, dawn will come the way I picture her, barefoot and disheveled, standing outside my window in one of the fragile cotton dresses of the poor. She will look in at me with her thin arms extended, offering a handful of birdsong and a small cup of light.
BILLY COLLINS

Bird Light Offering
The mind can be trained to relieve itself on paper.
BILLY COLLINS

Mind Paper Relieve Trained
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 COLLINS

Beating Mean Rope Tie Ties
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
I write two lines or three lines. I will immediately stop and turn into a reader instead of a writer, and I’ll read those lines as if I had never seen them before and as if I had never written them.
BILLY COLLINS

Instead never Reader Stop Writer Written
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

The pen is an instrument of discovery rather than just a recording implement. If you write a letter of resignation or something with an agenda, you’re simply using a pen to record what you have thought out.

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Popular Authors

The pen is an instrument of discovery rather than just a recording implement. If you write a letter of resignation or something with an agenda, you’re simply using a pen to record what you have thought out.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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