I think a good poem should have some inscrutable part. You can't quite explain it. The poem can only explain itself to… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
Poems are not easy to start, and they're not easy to finish. There's a great pleasure in - I wouldn't say ease,… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
I'm trying to write poems that involve beginning at a known place, and ending up at a slightly different place. I'm trying… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
I write with a Uni-Ball Onyx Micropoint on nine-by-seven bound notebooks made by a Canadian company called Blueline. After I do a… — 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
Robert Frost really started this whole thing rolling. He was, I believe, the first poet who started going to colleges. Before that,… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
I hope the poem, as it goes on, gets more complicated, a little more demanding, a little more ambiguous or speculative, so… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
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… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
Another trouble with poetry - and I'm gonna stop the list at two - is the presence of presumptuousness in poetry, the… — 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
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
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
Now I would say at any given moment in American life, there are probably 45 poets in airplanes vectoring across the country… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
By clarity I don't mean that we're always in kind of a simple area where everything is clear and comforting and understood.… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
I just think that the world of workshops - I've written a poem that is a parody of workshop talk, I've written… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
I think what gets a poem going is an initiating line. Sometimes a first line will occur, and it goes nowhere; but… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
“It is time to float on the waters of the night. Time to wrap my arms around this book and press it… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
I see the progress typical in some of my poems as starting with something simple and moving into something more demanding. This… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
I try to presume that no one is interested in me. And I think experience bears that out. No one's interested in… — 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
One of the ridiculous aspects of being a poet is the huge gulf between how seriously we take ourselves and how generally… — 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
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
When you get a poem [in a public place], it happens to you so suddenly that you don't have time to deploy… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
“...The dog (the poet) is on top of a locomotive,”… “He’s got a box full of track, and he’s frenetically laying down… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
I'm very conscious of the fact that every line should have a cadence to it. It should contribute to the progress of… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
Poetry is my cheap means of transportation, by the end of the poem the reader should be in a different place from… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
Radio is such a perfect medium for the transmission of poetry, primarily because there just is the voice, there's no visual distraction. — 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
“It seems only yesterday I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I could… — 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
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
I'm a line-maker. I think that's what makes poets different from prose-writers. That's the main way. We think, not just in sentences… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
“You know the parlor trick. wrap your arms around your own body and from the back it looks like someone is embracing… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
“O Canada I have not forgotten you, as I kneel in my canoe, beholding this vision of a bookcase. You are the… — 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
Introduction To Poetry I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or… — 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
![“When you get a poem [in a public place], it happens to you so suddenly that you don't have time to deploy your anti-poetry deflector shields that were installed in high school.” quote by Billy Collins](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/283/billy-collins-3004_happens_when-you-get-a-poem-in-a-public-place-it_2255549.jpg)
