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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.
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
Really
Humor
Way
Less
Enticing
Things
Funny
Gate
Means
Departure
Place
Gates
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Reader
More quotes by Billy Collins
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
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.
Billy Collins
This love for everyday things, part natural from the wide eye of Infancy, part a literary calculation
Billy Collins
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.
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
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 deploy what I call their 'poetry deflector shields' that were installed in high school - there's little time to resist the poem.
Billy Collins
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
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
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
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
The trouble with poetry is that it encourages the writing of more poetry.
Billy Collins
I see woefully obscure poetry as simply a kind of verbal rudeness.
Billy Collins
One of these days I'm-a make me a book out of you.
Billy Collins
I sit in the dark and wait for a little flame to appear at the end of my pencil.
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 think the pleasure of form is that you have a companion with you besides all the poetry you have ever read.
Billy Collins
Vade Mecum I want the scissors to be sharp and the table perfectly level when you cut me out of my life and paste me in that book you always carry.
Billy Collins
Death is what makes life fun.
Billy Collins
High School is the place where poetry goes to die.
Billy Collins
And I should mention the light which falls through the big windows this time of day italicizing everything it touches.
Billy Collins
