I hope the poem, as it goes on, gets more complicated, a little more demanding, a little more ambiguous or speculative, so that we’re drifting away from the casual beginning of the poem into something a little more serious.
BILLY COLLINSI want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author’s name on the shore. But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.
More Billy Collins Quotes
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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.
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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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I knew that poets seemed to be miserable.
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I find it strange that – at least in my take on it – the people who are the most alarmed about the dire times we live in are the ones who seem to be humorless, in their taste for poetry anyway.
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Another trouble with poetry – and I’m gonna stop the list at two – is the presence of presumptuousness in poetry.
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I had a sense, I guess, from just reading a lot of poetry of how a poem would start and how it would end but really I didn’t know what I was doing. It had very little connection to my life.
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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 stared up at the ebbing quarter moon and the stars scattered like a handful of salt across the faraway sky.
BILLY COLLINS -
No one here likes a wet dog.
BILLY COLLINS -
I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author’s name on the shore. But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.
BILLY COLLINS -
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.
BILLY COLLINS -
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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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.
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When I began to dare to be clear, because 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.
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While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.
BILLY COLLINS