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Poem Quotes by Billy Collins
- 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…
- Poetry is my cheap means of transportation, by the end of the poem the reader should be in a different place from where he started.…
- Humor, for me, is really a gate of departure. Its a way of enticing a reader into a poem so that less funny things can…
- Write the poem only you can write.
- I think what gets a poem going is an initiating line. Sometimes a first line will occur, and it goes nowhere; but other times -…
- 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 few drafts, I…
- Listeners are kind of ambushed... if a poem just happens to be said when they're listening to the radio. The listener doesn't have time to…
- Often people, when they're confronted with a poem, it's like someone who keep saying 'what is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of…
- The first line is the DNA of the poem; the rest of the poem is constructed out of that first line. A lot of it…
- The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is, 'What happens to the reader once he or she…
- Introduction To Poetry I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear…
- All they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with a rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating…
More Poem Quotes
- If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem. — M H Abrams
- I don't think of poetry as a 'rational' activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases… — Margaret Atwood
- The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is… — Margaret Atwood
- For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its… — Paul Auster
- A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically. — Diane Ackerman
- I did that Grammys thing - I did a little freeform poem. — Beck
- Words are so often used in the opposite sense, as a screen of diversion. It's the struggle towards truthfulness which is the… — John Berger
- Is there any purpose to translating poetry? A poem does not contain information of importance, like a signpost or a warning notice. — James Buchan
- But short films are not inferior, just different. I think the short gives a freedom to film-makers. What's appealing is that you… — Jane Campion
- If you cannot be a poet, be the poem. — David Carradine
- A poem generated by its own laws may be unrealized and bad in terms of so-called objective principles of taste, judgement, deduction. — A. R. Ammons
- Each poem in becoming generates the laws by which it is generated: extensions of the laws to other poems never completely take. — A. R. Ammons