Billy Collins
All I wanted was to be a pea of being inside the green pod of time.Collection: Green
I see woefully obscure poetry as simply a kind of verbal rudeness.Collection: Kind
The trouble with poetry is that it encourages the writing of more poetry.Collection: Writing
And I should mention the light which falls through the big windows this time of day italicizing everything it touches.Collection: Fall
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 it with a hose to find out what it really means.Collection: Mean
I'm speaking to someone I'm trying to get to fall in love with me. I'm trying to speak intimately to one person. That should be clear. I'm not speaking to an audience. I'm not writing for the podium. I'm just writing, trying to write in a fairly quiet tone to one other reader who is by herself, or himself, and I'm trying to interrupt some silence in their life, which is utterance.Collection: Falling In Love
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 are comprehensible, and it's easy to criticize something you can understand.Collection: Real
I could look at you forever and never see the two of us togetherCollection: Two
...pleasure, of course, is a slippery word.... Our pleasures ultimately belong to us, not to the pleasure's source.Collection: Pleasure
You know how sometimes you just have a memory of looking up and seeing a face looking over your crib and then remember nothing until tenth grade? - I have one of these early memories where I'm in the back of my parents' car, a place I loved to spend a lot of time as an only child, not having to fight with venomous siblings over the only toy.Collection: Children
It seems only yesterday I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I could shine.Collection: Believe
I just think that the world of workshops - I've written a poem that is a parody of workshop talk, I've written a poem that is a kind of parody of a garrulous poet at a poetry reading who spends an inordinate amount of time explaining the poem before reading it, I've written a number of satirical poems about other poets.Collection: Reading
And strangely enoughthe only emotion I ever feel, is what the beaver must feel, as he bears each stick to his hidden construction, which creates the tranquil pond and gives the mallards somewhere to paddle, and the pair of swans a place to conceal their youngCollection: Swans
I see the progress typical in some of my poems as starting with something simple and moving into something more demanding. This is certainly the pattern of weird poetry.Collection: Moving
I was able to read poets that were - allowed me to be humorous without being silly.Collection: Humorous
I started moving away from poets like Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane and started reading poets like, again, Karl Shapiro, Howard Nemerov, Philip Larkin, and the British poets who were imported through that important anthology put together by Alvarez - and those would include Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes. And I think these poets gave me assurance that there were other ways to write besides the rather involuted style of high modernism whose high priests were Pound, Eliot and Stevens, and Crane perhaps.Collection: Moving
I was an only child, a very late child, born to parents who were both 39 at the time, which was very late back then. That kind of confirmed my sense of being the center of the universe, which I guess every child feels - children and poets both tend to feel.Collection: Children
This is not what it is like to be you, I realized as a few of your magnificent clouds flew over the rooftop. It is just me thinking about being you. And before I headed back down the hill, I walked in a circle around your house, making an invisible line which you would have to cross before dark.Collection: Dark
There are just long gaps where I can't find a point of insertion, I can't find a good opening line, I can't find a mood that I want to write into. But once I do, once a line falls out of the air, or I get a little inkling of a subject and I recognize that, it's like the sense that a game has started.Collection: Fall
The literary world is so full of pretension, and there's such an enormous gap between how seriously poets take themselves and how widely they're ignored by everybody else.Collection: World
Particularly when I thought of myself as a Wallace Stevens acolyte, I wrote very difficult poetry and I was really guilty of not knowing what I was talking about. I was going for a kind of clever verbal effect. I was trying to sound linguistically or verbally interesting. I had a sense, I guess, from just reading a lot of poetry of how a poem would start and how it would end but really I didn't know what I was doing. It had very little connection to my life.Collection: Clever
When I wrote I took on the role of the despondent and difficult to understand person. Whereas in life, I was easy to understand, to the point of being simple-minded maybe.Collection: Simple
It's time to float on the waters of the night. Time to wrap my arms around this book and press it to my chest, life preserver in a seat of unremarkable men and women anonymous faces on the street, a hundred thousand unalphabitized things a million forgotten hours.Collection: Book
I felt at some point that I had nothing to lose, and [laughs] maybe I was wrong. I think, you know, there's always these little autobiographical secrets behind things. I think I was really attacking my earlier self, and this kind of pretentious figure.Collection: Thinking
I try to presume that no one is interested in me. And I think experience bears that out. No one's interested in the experiences of a stranger - let's put it that way. And then you have difficulty combined with presumptuousness, which is the most dire trouble with poetry.Collection: Thinking
Until recently, I thought 'occasional poetry' meant that you wrote only occasionally.Collection: Occasional
More often than not in poetry I find difficulty to be gratuitous and show-offy and camouflaging, experimental to a kind of insane degree - a difficulty which really ignores the possibility of having a sensible reader.Collection: Insane
No one here likes a wet dog.Collection: Dog
I knew that poets seemed to be miserable.Collection: Miserable
There's this pet phrase about writing that is bandied around particularly in workshops about "finding your own voice as a poet", which I suppose means that you come out from under the direct influence of other poets and have perhaps found a way to combine those influences so that it appears to be your own voice.Collection: Writing
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 making some tonal adjustments, and it took me a long time to allow anything like fun into my poetry.Collection: Fun
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 answer the question that way, I think that poetry is gonna catch up with that technology quite soon.Collection: Technology
Now I would say at any given moment in American life, there are probably 45 poets in airplanes vectoring across the country heading towards...I don't know if anyone's reading it, but poets are still flying around the country going from lectern to lectern.That circuitry has become very well-established.Collection: Country
But some nights, I must tell you, I go down there after everyone has fallen asleep. I swim back and forth in the echoing blackness. I sing a love song as well as I can, lost for a while in the home of the rain.Collection: Song
I think more influential than Emily Dickinson or Coleridge or Wordsworth on my imagination were Warner Brothers, Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes cartoons.Collection: Brother
I think my poems are slightly underrated by the word accessible.Collection: Thinking
I think my work has to do with a sense that we are attempting, all the time, to create a logical, rational path through the day. To the left and right there are an amazing set of distractions that we usually can't afford to follow. But the poet is willing to stop anywhere.Collection: Thinking
Robert Frost really started this whole thing rolling. He was, I believe, the first poet who started going to colleges. Before that, poets didn't give public readings very often, certainly not - there was no circuit of schools.Collection: Believe
It's a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life.Collection: Good Things
I love to move like a mouse inside this puzzle for the body, balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found.Collection: Moving
I'm very conscious of the fact that every line should have a cadence to it. It should contribute to the progress of the poem. And that the ending of the line is a way of turning the reader's attention back into the interior of the poem.Collection: Should Have
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 take place later. It really is not an end in itself, but a means to an end.Collection: Mean
I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves, straining in circles of light to find more light until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs that we follow across a page of fresh snow.Collection: Reading
You, quote, find your voice, unquote, when you are able to invent this one character who resembles you, obviously, and probably is more like you than anyone else on earth, but is not the equivalent to you.Collection: Character
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. I would like him to be slightly disoriented at the end, like I drove him outside of town at night and dropped him off in a cornfield.Collection: Mean
When I'm constructing a poem, I'm trying to write one good line after another. One solid line after another. You know a lot of the lines - some hold up better as lines than others. But I'm not thinking of just writing a paragraph and then chopping it up.Collection: Writing
A trouble with poetry is the presence of presumptuousness in poetry, the sense you get in a poem that the poet takes for granted an interest on the reader's part in the poet's autobiographical life, in the poet's memories, problems, difficulties and even minor perceptions. I try to presume that no one is interested in me. And I think experience bears that out. No one's interested in the experiences of a stranger - let's put it that way. And then you have difficulty combined with presumptuousness, which is the most dire trouble with poetry.Collection: Memories
One of these days I'm-a make me a book out of you.Collection: Book