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It’s a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life.

Billy Collins

And the reason I am writing this on the back of a manila envelope now that they have left the train together is to tell you that when she turned to lift the large, delicate cello onto the overhead rack.
BILLY COLLINS

Eye Left Overhead Rack Tell Together Writing
I try to presume that no one is interested in me. And I think experience bears that out. No one’s interested in the experiences of a stranger – let’s put it that way. And then you have difficulty combined with presumptuousness, which is the most dire trouble with poetry.
BILLY COLLINS

Combined Experience Poetry Stranger
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
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.
BILLY COLLINS

Connecting Interesting Poem Poetry Sense
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.
BILLY COLLINS

Once Pleasurable Sitting Thinking Writing
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 name of the author is the first to go followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion,
BILLY COLLINS

Conclusion Fishing Memories Novel Phones
I have one of these early memories where I’m in the back of my parents’ car, a place I loved to spend a lot of time as an only child, not having to fight with venomous siblings over the only toy.
BILLY COLLINS

Child Early Memories Parents Time Venomous
There are just long gaps where I can’t find a point of insertion, I can’t find a good opening line.
BILLY COLLINS

Air Fall Insertion Open Time Writing
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
While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.
BILLY COLLINS

Novelists Poet Typewriters
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 see woefully obscure poetry as simply a kind of verbal rudeness.
BILLY COLLINS

Kind Obscure Rudeness
Robert Frost really started this whole thing rolling. He was, I believe, the first poet who started going to colleges. Before that, poets didn’t give public readings very often, certainly not – there was no circuit of schools.
BILLY COLLINS

Believe Poet Reading School Started
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.
BILLY COLLINS

Departure Funny Mean Things
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

It’s a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life.

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It’s a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life.

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Popular Authors

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