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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.

Billy Collins

I knew that poets seemed to be miserable.
BILLY COLLINS

Miserable Poet Seemed
So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.
BILLY COLLINS

Heart Names Wall
It is as if one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the Southern Hemisphere of the brain.
BILLY COLLINS

Brain Memories Southern
The pen is an instrument of discovery rather than just a recording implement. If you write a letter of resignation or something with an agenda, you’re simply using a pen to record what you have thought out.
BILLY COLLINS

Agendas Discovery Writing
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
Nationalism is a type of insanity in which the boundaries of a land replace God.
BILLY COLLINS

Boundaries Insanity Land
I see the progress typical in some of my poems as starting with something simple and moving into something more demanding. This is certainly the pattern of weird poetry.
BILLY COLLINS

Moving Progress Simple
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
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
I mean, the sonnet will simply tell you, that’s too many syllables or that’s too many lines or that’s the wrong place. So, instead of being alone, you’re in dialogue with the form.
BILLY COLLINS

Alone Dialogue Simply Sonnet Wrong
I think more influential than Emily Dickinson or Coleridge or Wordsworth on my imagination were Warner Brothers, Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes cartoons.
BILLY COLLINS

Brother Cartoon Creativity Thinking Wordsworth
In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.
BILLY COLLINS

Oneself Process Voice
I could look at you forever and never see the two of us together
BILLY COLLINS

Forever Together Two
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
Now I would say at any given moment in American life, there are probably 45 poets in airplanes vectoring across the country heading towards…
BILLY COLLINS

Across Airplane Country Reading Towards
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

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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