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
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
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
This is not what it is like to be you, I realized as a few of your magnificent clouds flew over 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
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
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 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 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
As soon as I start to write I'm very aware, I'm trying to be aware that a reader just might well pick… — 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 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
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 think the pleasure of form is that you have a companion with you besides all the poetry you have ever read. — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
I felt at some point that I had nothing to lose, and [laughs] maybe I was wrong. I think, you know, there's… — 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
There's a lot of unconscious activity that goes on I think in the composition of a poem. — 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
I think more influential than Emily Dickinson or Coleridge or Wordsworth on my imagination were Warner Brothers, Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes… — 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
