Latest Billy Collins Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• 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.

  Billy Collins

  Real, Thinking, Risk

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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. But I think you could also put it a different way. 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.

  Billy Collins

  Writing, Character, Mean

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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.

  Billy Collins

  Memories, Thinking, Perception

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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.

  Billy Collins

  Children, Parent, Only Child

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I always think W.S. Merwin's poems will last of anyone writing today. If I had to bet on posterity I would bet Merwin. My poems could easily evaporate. So I don't know. If you find yourself as a writer thinking about posterity you should probably go out for a brisk walk or something.

  Billy Collins

  Writing, Thinking, Finding Yourself

  "A Brisk Walk". Interview with Joel Whitney, www.guernicamag.com. June 14, 2006.

• 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.

  Billy Collins

  Should Have, Progress, Attention

  "A Brisk Walk". Interview with Joel Whitney, www.guernicamag.com. June 14, 2006.

• 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 the way prose writers do but also in lines. So we're doing these two things at the same time.

  Billy Collins

  Thinking, Two, Different

  "A Brisk Walk". Interview with Joel Whitney, www.guernicamag.com. June 14, 2006.

• 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.

  Billy Collins

  Writing, Thinking, Trying

  "A Brisk Walk". Interview with Joel Whitney, www.guernicamag.com. June 14, 2006.

• 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.

  Billy Collins

  Technology, Thinking, Answers

  "A Brisk Walk". Interview with Joel Whitney, www.guernicamag.com. June 14, 2006.

• I find it strange that - at least in my take on it - the people who are the most alarmed about the dire times we live in are the ones who seem to be humorless, in their taste for poetry anyway. Humor is just an ingredient. It's always been in poetry. It kind of dropped out of poetry I think during the 19th and up to the mid-twentieth century. But it's found its way back. And it's simply an ingredient.

  Billy Collins

  Thinking, People, Way

  "A Brisk Walk". Interview with Joel Whitney, www.guernicamag.com. June 14, 2006.

• As soon as I start to write I'm very aware, I'm trying to be aware that a reader just might well pick up this poem, a stranger. So when I'm writing - and I think that this is important for all writers - I'm trying to be a writer and a reader back and forth. I write two lines or three lines. I will immediately stop and turn into a reader instead of a writer, and I'll read those lines as if I had never seen them before and as if I had never written them.

  Billy Collins

  Writing, Thinking, Two

  "A Brisk Walk". Interview with Joel Whitney, www.guernicamag.com. June 14, 2006.

• 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 writing. Once the writing starts, it's too pleasurable to think of it as a difficulty.

  Billy Collins

  Writing, Thinking, Sitting

  "A Brisk Walk". Interview with Joel Whitney, www.guernicamag.com. June 14, 2006.

• 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.

  Billy Collins

  Falling In Love, Writing, Silence

  "A Brisk Walk". Interview with Joel Whitney, www.guernicamag.com. June 14, 2006.

• 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.

  Billy Collins

  Fall, Writing, Air

  "A Brisk Walk". Interview with Joel Whitney, www.guernicamag.com. June 14, 2006.

• Part of writing is discovering the rules of the game and then deciding whether to follow the rules or to break them. The great thing about the game of poetry is that it's always your turn - I guess that goes back to my being an only child. So once it's under way, there is a sense of flow.

  Billy Collins

  Children, Writing, Games

  "A Brisk Walk". Interview with Joel Whitney, www.guernicamag.com. June 14, 2006.

• 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.

  Billy Collins

  Moving, Simple, Progress

  "A Brisk Walk". Interview with Joel Whitney, www.guernicamag.com. June 14, 2006.

• Poems are not easy to start, and they're not easy to finish. There's a great pleasure in - I wouldn't say ease, but maybe kind of a fascinated ease that accompanies the actual writing of the poem. I find it very difficult to get started.

  Billy Collins

  Writing, Ease, Be Kind

  "A Brisk Walk". Interview with Joel Whitney, www.guernicamag.com. June 14, 2006.

• By clarity I don't mean that we're always in kind of a simple area where everything is clear and comforting and understood. Clarity is certainly a way toward disorientation because if you don't start out - if the reader isn't grounded, if the reader is disoriented in the beginning of the poem, then the reader can't be led astray or disoriented later.

  Billy Collins

  Mean, Simple, Comforting

  "A Brisk Walk". Interview with Joel Whitney, www.guernicamag.com. June 14, 2006.

• 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.

  Billy Collins

  Thinking, Self, Laughing

  "A Brisk Walk". Interview with Joel Whitney, www.guernicamag.com. June 14, 2006.

• 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.

  Billy Collins

  Reading, Thinking, Numbers

  "A Brisk Walk". Interview with Joel Whitney, www.guernicamag.com. June 14, 2006.

• 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.

  Billy Collins

  Moving, Reading, Writing

  "A Brisk Walk". Interview with Joel Whitney, www.guernicamag.com. June 14, 2006.

• 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.

  Billy Collins

  Simple, Roles, Easy

  "A Brisk Walk". Interview with Joel Whitney, www.guernicamag.com. June 14, 2006.

• When I began to dare to be clear, because 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.

  Billy Collins

  Real, Thinking, Risk

  "A Brisk Walk". Interview with Joel Whitney, www.guernicamag.com. June 14, 2006.

• 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.

  Billy Collins

  Clever, Reading, Talking

  "A Brisk Walk". Interview with Joel Whitney, www.guernicamag.com. June 14, 2006.

• 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.

  Billy Collins

  Thinking, Trying, Way

  "A Brisk Walk". Interview with Joel Whitney, www.guernicamag.com. June 14, 2006.