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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

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

Mind Paper Relieve Trained
Humor is just an ingredient. It’s always been in poetry. It kind of dropped out of poetry I think during the 19th and up to the mid-twentieth century. But it’s found its way back. And it’s simply an ingredient.
BILLY COLLINS

Dropped Found Ingriidient Poetry Simply
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’s time to float on the waters of the night. Time to wrap my arms around this book and press it to my chest, life preserver in a seat of unremarkable men and women anonymous faces on the street, a hundred thousand unalphabitized things a million forgotten hours.
BILLY COLLINS

Arms Book Men Night Preserve Press
I was a pretty happy kid, I had to fake it. I had to get into this miserable character before I wrote poems.
BILLY COLLINS

Character Happy Kid Kids
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
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
So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.
BILLY COLLINS

Heart Names Wall
I’m a line-maker. I think that’s what makes poets different from prose-writers. That’s the main way. We think, not just in sentences the way prose writers do but also in lines. So we’re doing these two things at the same time.
BILLY COLLINS

Different Thinking Two
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
I write with a Uni-Ball Onyx Micropoint on nine-by-seven bound notebooks made by a Canadian company called Blueline. After I do a few drafts, I type up the poem on a Macintosh G3 and then send it out the door.
BILLY COLLINS

Doors Notebook Writing
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.
BILLY COLLINS

Comprehensible Exposed Real Risk Saying Thinking
In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.
BILLY COLLINS

Oneself Process Voice
I can’t picture myself starting out aiming to do anything or having much of an agenda.I think in writing a poem, I’m making some tonal adjustments, and it took me a long time to allow anything like fun into my poetry.
BILLY COLLINS

Fun Thinking Writing
This love for everyday things, part natural from the wide eye of Infancy, part a literary calculation
BILLY COLLINS

Day Every Eye Natural Things

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.

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Popular Authors

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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