I think clarity is the real risk in poetry because you are exposed. You're out in the open field. You're actually saying… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
...pleasure, of course, is a slippery word.... Our pleasures ultimately belong to us, not to the pleasure's so — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
A trouble with poetry is the presence of presumptuousness in poetry, the sense you get in a poem that the poet takes… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
I can hear the library humming in the night, a choir of authors murmuring inside their books along the unlit, alphabetical shelves,… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
Humor, for me, is really a gate of departure. Its a way of enticing a reader into a poem so that less… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
Usually the poems are written in one sitting. There's always a groping towards some satisfying ending. But I'd say the hardest part… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
Some difficulty is warranted and other difficulty I think is gratuitous. And I think I can tell the difference. There are certainly… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
Listeners are kind of ambushed... if a poem just happens to be said when they're listening to the radio. The listener doesn't… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
“Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes" First, her tippet made of tulle, easily lifted off her shoulders and laid on the back of… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
To write poetry is to be very alone, but you always have the company of your influences. But you also have the… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
I was able to read poets that were - allowed me to be humorous without being silly. — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane. — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
Particularly when I thought of myself as a Wallace Stevens acolyte, I wrote very difficult poetry and I was really guilty of… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is, 'What happens to the reader once… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
“Is there a better method of departure by night than this quiet bon voyage with an open book, the sole companion who… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
Poetry is like standing on the edge of a lake on a moonlit night and the light of the moon is always… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
Part of writing is discovering the rules of the game and then deciding whether to follow the rules or to break them.… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
There's this pet phrase about writing that is bandied around particularly in workshops about "finding your own voice as a poet", which… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
I find it strange that - at least in my take on it - the people who are the most alarmed about… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
“ …(my father) would say nothing, And I could not find a silence Among the one hundred Chinese silences That would fit… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
The first line is the DNA of the poem; the rest of the poem is constructed out of that first line. A… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
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… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
More often than not in poetry I find difficulty to be gratuitous and show-offy and camouflaging, experimental to a kind of insane… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
“ Picnic, Lightning It is possible to be struck by a meteor or a single-engine plane while reading in a chair at… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
“The whole idea of it makes me feel Like I’m coming down with something, Something worse than any stomach ache Or the headaches I… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
I think clarity is the real risk in poetry because you are exposed. You're out in the open field. You're actually saying things that… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
...pleasure, of course, is a slippery word.... Our pleasures ultimately belong to us, not to the pleasure's so — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
I stared up at the ebbing quarter moon and the stars scattered like a handful of salt across the faraway sky... — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
A trouble with poetry is the presence of presumptuousness in poetry, the sense you get in a poem that the poet takes for granted… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
You come by your style by learning what to leave out. At first you tend to overwrite—embellishment instead of insight. You either continue to… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
But my heart is always propped up in a field on its tripod, ready for the next arrow. — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
I can hear the library humming in the night, a choir of authors murmuring inside their books along the unlit, alphabetical shelves, Giovanni Pontano… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
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… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
Humor, for me, is really a gate of departure. Its a way of enticing a reader into a poem so that less funny things… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
You know how sometimes you just have a memory of looking up and seeing a face looking over your crib and then remember nothing… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
