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I was able to read poets that were – allowed me to be humorous without being silly.

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
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
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
Poetry is like standing on the edge of a lake on a moonlit night and the light of the moon is always pointing straight at you.
BILLY COLLINS

Lakes Moon Night Pointing
I think my poems are slightly underrated by the word accessible.
BILLY COLLINS

Accessible Poems Thinking Underrated
While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.
BILLY COLLINS

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

Heart Names Wall
I’m just writing, trying to write in a fairly quiet tone to one other reader who is by herself, or himself, and I’m trying to interrupt some silence in their life, which is utterance.
BILLY COLLINS

Himself Interrupt Other Reader Utterance
I thought originally when I was in school and I wanted to be a poet, I knew that poets seemed to be miserable.
BILLY COLLINS

Miserable Poet School
I was able to read poets that were – allowed me to be humorous without being silly.
BILLY COLLINS

Able Humorous Silly
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
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
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
Introduction To Poetry I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem’s room and feel the walls for a light switch.
BILLY COLLINS

Mean Names Wall
I can hear the library humming in the night, a choir of authors murmuring inside their books along the unlit, alphabetical shelves, Giovanni Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son, each one stitched into his own private coat, together forming a low, gigantic chord of language.
BILLY COLLINS

Alphabetical Book Country Night People Shelves Son

I was able to read poets that were – allowed me to be humorous without being silly.

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I was able to read poets that were – allowed me to be humorous without being silly.

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