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…balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found.
More Billy Collins Quotes
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The mind can be trained to relieve itself on paper.
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So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.
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I see woefully obscure poetry as simply a kind of verbal rudeness.
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But some nights, I must tell you, I go down there after everyone has fallen asleep. I swim back and forth in the echoing blackness. I sing a love song as well as I can, lost for a while in the home of the rain.
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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 thought I would be completely content if I was recognized at some later point in my life as a third-rate Wallace Stevens.
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The sense you get in a poem that the poet takes for granted an interest on the reader’s part in the poet’s autobiographical life, in the poet’s memories, problems, difficulties and even minor perceptions.
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The entire novel which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of, as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain, to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
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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.
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Bugs Bunny is my muse.
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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.
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But I think you could also put it a different way. 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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Form is any aspect of a poem that encourages it to stay whole and not drift off into chaos.
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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.
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I knew that poets seemed to be miserable.
BILLY COLLINS