I think what gets a poem going is an initiating line. Sometimes a first line will occur, and it goes nowhere; but other times - and this, I think, is a sense you develop - I can tell that the line wants to continue.
Billy CollinsRead
People think of poetry as a school subject... Poetry is very frustrating to students because they don't have a taste for ambiguity, for one thing. That gives them a poetry hangover.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Billy Collins highlights the challenges students face with poetry, particularly due to their struggle with ambiguity.
In this quote, Billy Collins expresses his view on how students often perceive poetry as a dry and frustrating subject. He argues that their difficulties stem from a lack of appreciation for the abstract and ambiguous nature of poetry, leading to a disconnect that he metaphorically refers to as a 'poetry hangover'. This suggests that understanding and enjoying poetry requires embracing uncertainty and complexity, which many students find challenging.
Themes
PoetryAmbiguityEducationStudentsFrustration
In practice
Example use cases
Teachers can use this quote to open discussions about the challenges of studying poetry in classrooms.
More from Billy Collins
All quotes →To a poet, it's quite ruinous to have a poem distorted, out of shape, or squeezed, shall we say, into this tiny screen. But I'm not sure big digital companies are sensitive to the needs of poets.
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All they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with a rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.
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And the reason I am writing this on the back of a manila envelope now that they have left the train together is to tell you that when she turned to lift the large, delicate cello onto the overhead rack, I saw him looking up at her and what she was doing the way the eyes of saints are painted when they are looking up at God when he is doing something remarkable, something that identifies him as God.
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The whole world of publishing is moving to electronic, but when you put a poem on a screen and you increase the type size, the shape of a poem changes.
Billy CollinsRead
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. In a poem, the pen is more like a flashlight, a Geiger counter, or one of those metal detectors that people walk around beaches with.
Billy CollinsRead
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