Introduction To Poetry I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem's room and feel the walls for a light switch. I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author's name on the shore. But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.
The literary world is so full of pretension, and there's such an enormous gap between how seriously poets take themselves and how widely they're igno… - Billy Collins
The literary world is so full of pretension, and there's such an enormous gap between how seriously poets take themselves and how widely they're igno…
- Billy Collins
It's time to float on the waters of the night. Time to wrap my arms around this book and press it to my chest, life preserver in a seat of unremarkab… - Billy Collins
It's time to float on the waters of the night. Time to wrap my arms around this book and press it to my chest, life preserver in a seat of unremarkab…
But tomorrow, dawn will come the way I picture her, barefoot and disheveled, standing outside my window in one of the fragile cotton dresses of the p… - Billy Collins
But tomorrow, dawn will come the way I picture her, barefoot and disheveled, standing outside my window in one of the fragile cotton dresses of the p…
In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice. - Billy Collins
In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.
Write the poem only you can write. - Billy Collins
Write the poem only you can write.
I think my work has to do with a sense that we are attempting, all the time, to create a logical, rational path through the day. To the left and righ… - Billy Collins
I think my work has to do with a sense that we are attempting, all the time, to create a logical, rational path through the day. To the left and righ…
The mind can be trained to relieve itself on paper. - Billy Collins
The mind can be trained to relieve itself on paper.
While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane. - Billy Collins
While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.
A motto I've adopted is, if at first you don't succeed, hide all evidence that you ever tried. - Billy Collins
A motto I've adopted is, if at first you don't succeed, hide all evidence that you ever tried.
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