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It is as if one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the Southern Hemisphere of the brain.
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
Decided
Memories
Brain
Hemisphere
Used
Harbor
Harbors
Retire
Retiring
Southern
More quotes by Billy Collins
I could look at you forever and never see the two of us together
Billy Collins
The mind can be trained to relieve itself on paper.
Billy Collins
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 this?' And that dulls us to the other pleasures poetry offers.
Billy Collins
I see woefully obscure poetry as simply a kind of verbal rudeness.
Billy Collins
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.
Billy Collins
I hope the poem, as it goes on, gets more complicated, a little more demanding, a little more ambiguous or speculative, so that we're drifting away from the casual beginning of the poem into something a little more serious.
Billy Collins
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
I think more influential than Emily Dickinson or Coleridge or Wordsworth on my imagination were Warner Brothers, Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes cartoons.
Billy Collins
Radio is such a perfect medium for the transmission of poetry, primarily because there just is the voice, there's no visual distraction.
Billy Collins
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.
Billy Collins
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
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 has to do with tone because tone is the key signature for the poem. The basis of trust for a reader used to be meter and end-rhyme.
Billy Collins
The trouble with poetry is that it encourages the writing of more poetry.
Billy Collins
You will always be the bread and the knife, not to mention the crystal goblet and—somehow—the wine.
Billy Collins
And I should mention the light which falls through the big windows this time of day italicizing everything it touches.
Billy Collins
Death is what makes life fun.
Billy Collins
Another trouble with poetry - and I'm gonna stop the list at two - 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.
Billy Collins
High School is the place where poetry goes to die.
Billy Collins
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 gets inside the poem?' That's the real question for me, is getting the reader into the poem and then taking the reader somewhere, because I think of poetry as a kind of form of travel writing.
Billy Collins
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
