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

Billy Collins

You’ll find i-poetry, you’ll find that you can download poetry, that you can stuff your i-pod with recorded poetry. So just to answer the question that way, I think that poetry is gonna catch up with that technology quite soon.
BILLY COLLINS

Answer Technology Thinking
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
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
Radio is such a perfect medium for the transmission of poetry, primarily because there just is the voice, there’s no visual distraction.
BILLY COLLINS

Distraction Perfect Primarily Radio Voice
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
Every Day Is for the Thief is a vivid, episodic evocation of the truism that you can’t go home again; but that doesn’t mean you’re not free to try.
BILLY COLLINS

Day Every Home Mean Trying
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.
BILLY COLLINS

Anymore Facts Jobs Serious
A motto I’ve adopted is, if at first you don’t succeed, hide all evidence that you ever tried.
BILLY COLLINS

Firsts Motto Succeed
I felt at some point that I had nothing to lose, and [laughs] maybe I was wrong. I think, you know, there’s always these little autobiographical secrets behind things. I think I was really attacking my earlier self, and this kind of pretentious figure.
BILLY COLLINS

Laughing Self Thinking
Nationalism is a type of insanity in which the boundaries of a land replace God.
BILLY COLLINS

Boundaries Insanity Land
I could look at you forever and never see the two of us together
BILLY COLLINS

Forever Together Two
I was able to read poets that were – allowed me to be humorous without being silly.
BILLY COLLINS

Able Humorous Silly
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 COLLINS

Demanding Goes Littles On Serious
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
My poems could easily evaporate. So I don’t know. If you find yourself as a writer thinking about posterity you should probably go out for a brisk walk or something.
BILLY COLLINS

Poem Posterity Something Thinking Walk
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.
BILLY COLLINS

Astray Beginning Clarity Disorientated Poem Reader

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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