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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

High School is the place where poetry goes to die.
BILLY COLLINS

Dies High School
I think the pleasure of form is that you have a companion with you besides all the poetry you have ever read.
BILLY COLLINS

Form Pleasure Read Thinking
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
Vade Mecum I want the scissors to be sharp and the table perfectly level when you cut me out of my life and paste me in that book you always carry.
BILLY COLLINS

Book Cutting Levels Life Scissors
I saw him looking up at her and what she was doing the way the eyes of saints are painted when they are looking up at God when he is doing something remarkable, something that identifies him as God.
BILLY COLLINS

God Looking Remarkable Saint Something
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
So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.
BILLY COLLINS

Heart Names Wall
I don’t know if anyone’s reading it, but poets are still flying around the country going from lectern to lectern.That circuitry has become very well-established.
BILLY COLLINS

Anyone Country Established Going Lectern
There are just long gaps where I can’t find a point of insertion, I can’t find a good opening line.
BILLY COLLINS

Air Fall Insertion Open Time Writing
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’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
Death is what makes life fun.
BILLY COLLINS

Death Fun Life
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
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
I was an only child, a very late child, born to parents who were both 39 at the time, which was very late back then. That kind of confirmed my sense of being the center of the universe, which I guess every child feels – children and poets both tend to feel.
BILLY COLLINS

Child Children Only Parent

I was a pretty happy kid, I had to fake it. I had to get into this miserable character before I wrote poems.

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I was a pretty happy kid, I had to fake it. I had to get into this miserable character before I wrote poems.

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Popular Authors

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