American - Poet | March 22, 1941 -
A lot of my poems either have historical sequences or other kinds of chronological grids where I'm locating myself in time. I like to feel oriented, and I like to orient the reader at the beginning of a poem.
Billy Collins
TimeMyselfBeginningFeelWhere
My poems tend to have rhetorical structures; what I mean by that is they tend to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. There tends to be an opening, as if you were reading the opening chapter of a novel. They sound like I'm initiating something, or I'm making a move.
BeginningReadingEndYouChapter
I'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.
GreatPoetryTablePlacesClassroom
I'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.
LoveDeathPoetryHappyLostStick
The disappointing second novel is measured against the brilliant first novel - often no novel lives up to the first. Literary improvement seems like an unfair expectation.
ImprovementUnfairBrilliantFirst
I don't write for an auditorium full of people. I don't write for the microphone; I write for the page.
PeoplePageWriteMicrophoneFull
I am increasingly attracted to restricting possibility in the poem by inflicting a form upon yourself. Once you impose some formal pattern on yourself, then the poem is pushing back. I think good poems are often the result of that kind of wrestling with the form.
GoodYourselfI AmThinkResultYou
When I was a young man, I understood that poetry was two things - it was difficult to understand, but you could understand that the poet was miserable. So for a while there, I wrote poems that were hard to understand, even by me, but gave off whiffs of misery.
ManPoetryMeYouYoungYoung Man
I don't think I've ever written a poem whose intention was just to be funny. I've written poems that start out funny and often shift into something more serious.
FunnyStartThinkIntentionSerious
I'm a nearly uncontrollable Geoff Dyer fan, who I think is one of the most comically brilliant writers today.
TodayThinkBrilliantWhoFanMost
I'll listen to anything authentic whether it's bluegrass or gospel or blues.
BluesListenAnythingBluegrass
I have a stack of those plastic card hotel room keys that I picked up on this latest book tour. It's about a yard tall. Ah yes, a stack of lonely nights.
BookLonelyHotelTallPlasticRoom
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