01c. 1941 ADThere are easier ways of making sense,the connoisseurship of gesture, for example.You hold a girl's face in your hands like a vase.You lift a gun from the glove compartmentand toss it out the window into the desert heat.Billy Collins / quote ↗
02c. 1941 ADThere's something very authentic about humor, when you think about it. Anybody can pretend to be serious. But you can't pretend to be funny.Billy Collins / quote ↗
03c. 1941 ADHumor, for me, is really a gate of departure. It's 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 / quote ↗
04c. 1941 ADI'm happy to stick with my persona. There are themes of love lost and love regained, but the main themes of all poems are basically love and death, and that seems to be the message of poetry.Billy Collins / quote ↗
05c. 1941 ADIf an artist is driven primarily by social responsibility, I think the art probably suffers because, again, just as leadership has a rather defined end point or purpose, social responsibility would seem to have a very clear moral context.Billy Collins / quote ↗
06c. 1941 ADThe 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 / quote ↗
07c. 1941 ADA lasting marriage, they say, is one where the two reach for different sections of the Sunday paper. Me, I go right for the obituaries, just like those very elderly characters in Muriel Spark's spooky novel, 'Memento Mori.'Billy Collins / quote ↗
08c. 1941 ADI think more influential than Emily Dickinson or Coleridge or Wordsworth on my imagination were Warner Brothers, Merrie Melodies, and Loony Tunes cartoons.Billy Collins / quote ↗
09c. 1941 ADPoetry can do a lot of things to people. I mean it can improve your imagination. It can take you to new places. It can give you this incredible form of verbal pleasure.Billy Collins / quote ↗
10c. 1941 ADI'm trying to write poems that involve beginning at a known place, and ending up at a slightly different place. I'm trying to take a little journey from one place to another, and it's usually from a realistic place, to a place in the imagination.Billy Collins / quote ↗
11c. 1941 ADOne of the disadvantages of poetry over popular music is that if you write a pop song, it naturally gets into people's heads as they listen in the car. You don't have to memorize a Paul Simon song; it's just in your head, and you can sing along. With a poem, you have to will yourself to memorize it.Billy Collins / quote ↗
12c. 1941 ADThe life of Edward Estlin Cummings began with a childhood in Cambridge, Mass., that he described as happy, but he struggled in both his artistic and romantic exploits against the piousness of his father, an esteemed Harvard professor.Billy Collins / quote ↗
13c. 1941 ADI'm a great believer in poetry out of the classroom, in public places, on subways, trains, on cocktail napkins. I'd rather have my poems on the subway than around the seminar table at an MFA program.Billy Collins / quote ↗
14c. 1941 ADPoetry 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.Billy Collins / quote ↗
15c. 1941 ADOften 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 / quote ↗
16c. 1941 ADRadio is such a perfect medium for the transmission of poetry, primarily because there just is the voice, there's no visual distraction.Billy Collins / quote ↗
17c. 1941 ADI know my voice has a limited range of motion; I don't write dramatic monologues and pretend to be other people. But so far, my voice is broad enough to accommodate most of what I want to put into my poetry. I like my persona; I often wish I were him and not me.Billy Collins / quote ↗
18c. 1941 ADI think if a poet wanted to lead, he or she would want the message to be unequivocally clear and free of ambiguity. Whereas poetry is actually the home of ambiguity, ambivalence and uncertainty.Billy Collins / quote ↗
19c. 1941 ADIn the long revolt against inherited forms that has by now become the narrative of 20th-century poetry in English, no poet was more flamboyant or more recognizable in his iconoclasm than Cummings.Billy Collins / quote ↗
20c. 1941 ADThere 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 / quote ↗
21c. 1941 ADListeners 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 / quote ↗
22c. 1941 ADI'm pretty much all for poetry in public places - poetry on buses, poetry on subways, on billboards, on cereal boxes.Billy Collins / quote ↗
23c. 1941 ADWe love, you know, children love the ingredients of poetry. And then they go into this tunnel that we call adolescence, and when they come out of it, they hate poetry.Billy Collins / quote ↗
24c. 1941 ADI have my Poetry 180 project, which I've made my main project. We encourage high schools, because that's really where, for most people, poetry dies off and gets buried under other adolescent pursuits.Billy Collins / quote ↗
