Billy Collins Quotes
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I try to write very fast. I don't revise very much. I write the poem in one sitting. Just let it rip. It's usually over in twenty to forty minutes. I'll go back and tinker with a word or two, change a line for some metrical reason weeks later, but I try to get the whole thing just done.
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I am a nonparticipant of social media. I'm not much attracted to anything that involves the willing forfeiture of privacy and the foregrounding of insignificance.
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Poetry is my cheap means of transportation. By the end of the poem the reader should be in a different place from where he started. I would like him to be slightly disoriented at the end, like I drove him outside of town at night and dropped him off in a cornfield.
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When I was a young man, I understood that poetry was two things - it was difficult to understand, but you could understand that the poet was miserable. So for a while there, I wrote poems that were hard to understand, even by me, but gave off whiffs of misery.
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My poems tend to have rhetorical structures; what I mean by that is they tend to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. There tends to be an opening, as if you were reading the opening chapter of a novel. They sound like I'm initiating something, or I'm making a move.
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The first line is the DNA of the poem; the rest of the poem is constructed out of that first line. A lot of it has to do with tone because tone is the key signature for the poem. The basis of trust for a reader used to be meter and end-rhyme.
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I'm trying to write poems that involve beginning at a known place, and ending up at a slightly different place. I'm trying to take a little journey from one place to another, and it's usually from a realistic place, to a place in the imagination.
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I'm going through life's cycles at an alarmingly fast pace, but my persona has a Peter Pan quality: he doesn't age.
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There's something very authentic about humor, when you think about it. Anybody can pretend to be serious. But you can't pretend to be funny.
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It's an important social duty to spread the word of English to people whose livelihoods depend on knowing the language.
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I'm not a claustrophobe, but you don't need to be to feel claustrophobic inside an MRI. It's like being buried alive.
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I think what gets a poem going is an initiating line. Sometimes a first line will occur, and it goes nowhere; but other times - and this, I think, is a sense you develop - I can tell that the line wants to continue. If it does, I can feel a sense of momentum - the poem finds a reason for continuing.
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Poetry can do a lot of things to people. I mean it can improve your imagination. It can take you to new places. It can give you this incredible form of verbal pleasure.
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I'm a nearly uncontrollable Geoff Dyer fan, who I think is one of the most comically brilliant writers today.
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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.
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I find that my reading, particularly nonfiction, can inspire a poem as well as anything else.
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Humor, for me, is really a gate of departure. It's 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.
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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. In a poem, the pen is more like a flashlight, a Geiger counter, or one of those metal detectors that people walk around beaches with.
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I'm all for poetry catching up with technology, and just as there are iTunes, I think we should have iPoems. I mean, people should be able to walk around with their earbuds in and listening to poems on their iPod.
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I first came across 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' in college, with other anthologized poems by Yeats.
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Cummings' career as a writer - and a painter - was as wobbly as his love life. He tried his hand at playwriting, satirical essays, and even a dance scenario for Lincoln Kirsten.
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I don't think anybody reads a book of poetry front to back. Editors and reviewers only. I don't think anybody else does.
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My persona is less miserable than a lot of contemporary poetry speakers are.
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To a poet, it's quite ruinous to have a poem distorted, out of shape, or squeezed, shall we say, into this tiny screen. But I'm not sure big digital companies are sensitive to the needs of poets.