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
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
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
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 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
“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
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
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
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
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
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
The literary world is so full of pretension, and there's such an enormous gap between how seriously poets take themselves and how… — 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
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
There are interesting forms of difficulty, and there are unprofitable forms of difficulty. I mean, I enjoy some difficult poetry, but some… — 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
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
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
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
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 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
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
I always think W.S. Merwin's poems will last of anyone writing today. If I had to bet on posterity I would bet… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
I think my work has to do with a sense that we are attempting, all the time, to create a logical, rational… — 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
“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
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
...pleasure, of course, is a slippery word… Our pleasures ultimately belong to us, not to the pleasure's so — Billy Collins Copy Share
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
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
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
But my heart is always propped up in a field on its tripod, ready for the next arrow. — Billy Collins Copy Share
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
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
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
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
Usually the poems are written in one sitting. There's always a groping towards some satisfying ending. But I'd say the hardest part is not… — Billy Collins Copy Share
I was influenced by the Beats because I actually just began to commit adolescence around 1955, when "Howl" and Rebel Without a Cause and… — Billy Collins Copy Share
Some difficulty is warranted and other difficulty I think is gratuitous. And I think I can tell the difference. There are certainly very difficult… — Billy Collins Copy Share
