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 COLLINSI’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.
More Billy Collins Quotes
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There are just long gaps where I can’t find a point of insertion, I can’t find a good opening line.
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I stared up at the ebbing quarter moon and the stars scattered like a handful of salt across the faraway sky.
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There’s a lot of unconscious activity that goes on I think in the composition of a poem.
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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 was a pretty happy kid, I had to fake it. I had to get into this miserable character before I wrote poems.
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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.
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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.
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The really authentic thing about humor is that anyone can pretend to be serious. Anyone who’s ever had a job – in fact, we’re pretending to be serious now, more or less.
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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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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.
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Clarity is certainly a way toward disorientation because if you don’t start out – if the reader isn’t grounded, if the reader is disoriented in the beginning of the poem, then the reader can’t be led astray or disoriented later.
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…balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found.
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I think the pleasure of form is that you have a companion with you besides all the poetry you have ever read.
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One of the ridiculous aspects of being a poet is the huge gulf between how seriously we take ourselves and how generally we are ignored by everybody else.
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I knew that poets seemed to be miserable.
BILLY COLLINS