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
There's a lot of unconscious activity that goes on I think in the composition of a poem. — 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
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
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
When I'm constructing a poem, I'm trying to write one good line after another. One solid line after another. You know a… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
I started moving away from poets like Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane and started reading poets like, again, Karl Shapiro, Howard Nemerov,… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
It's a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life. — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
“ Japan Today I pass the time reading a favorite haiku, saying the few words over and over. It feels like eating… — 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
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
“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
“ Marginalia Sometimes the notes are ferocious, skirmishes against the author raging along the borders of every page in tiny black script.… — 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
“all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They… — 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
When I began to dare to be clear, because I think clarity is the real risk in poetry because you are exposed.… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
Often people, when they're confronted with a poem, it's like someone who keep saying 'what is the meaning of this? What is… — 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
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
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
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
“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…” 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)
