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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.

Billy Collins

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Billy Collins
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: March 22
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
William James Collins
Home
Forth
Back
Sing
Wells
Rain
Echoing
Well
Everyone
Blackness
Must
Song
Asleep
Love
Lost
Nights
Tell
Swim
Night
Fallen

More quotes by Billy Collins

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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.
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I think the pleasure of form is that you have a companion with you besides all the poetry you have ever read.
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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.
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Radio is such a perfect medium for the transmission of poetry, primarily because there just is the voice, there's no visual distraction.
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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
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I think more influential than Emily Dickinson or Coleridge or Wordsworth on my imagination were Warner Brothers, Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes cartoons.
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You will always be the bread and the knife, not to mention the crystal goblet and—somehow—the wine.
Billy Collins
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And I should mention the light which falls through the big windows this time of day italicizing everything it touches.
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I think a good poem should have some inscrutable part. You can't quite explain it. The poem can only explain itself to a certain limit and at that point you enter into a little bit of mystery. That for me is the perfect poem: to begin in clarity and to end in mystery.
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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 young
Billy Collins
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I see woefully obscure poetry as simply a kind of verbal rudeness.
Billy Collins
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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
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Death is what makes life fun.
Billy Collins
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The pen is an instrument of discovery rather than just a recording implement. If you write a letter of resignation or something with an agenda, you're simply using a pen to record what you have thought out.
Billy Collins
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There are interesting forms of difficulty, and there are unprofitable forms of difficulty. I mean, I enjoy some difficult poetry, but some of it is impenetrable and I actually wouldn't want to penetrate it if I could, perhaps.
Billy Collins
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I could look at you forever and never see the two of us together
Billy Collins
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All I wanted was to be a pea of being inside the green pod of time.
Billy Collins
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The trouble with poetry is that it encourages the writing of more poetry.
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I can hear the library humming in the night, a choir of authors murmuring inside their books along the unlit, alphabetical shelves, Giovanni Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son, each one stitched into his own private coat, together forming a low, gigantic chord of language.
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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.
Billy Collins