When you get a poem [in a public place], it happens to you so suddenly that you don't have time to deploy your anti-poetry deflector shields that were installed in high school.
Billy CollinsAll 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.
Billy CollinsYou will always be the bread and the knife, not to mention the crystal goblet and—somehow—the wine.
Billy CollinsIt is as if one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the Southern Hemisphere of the brain.
Billy CollinsPoetry is like standing on the edge of a lake on a moonlit night and the light of the moon is always pointing straight at you.
Billy CollinsBy clarity I don't mean that we're always in kind of a simple area where everything is clear and comforting and understood. Clarity is certainly a way toward disorientation because if you don't start out - if the reader isn't grounded, if the reader is disoriented in the beginning of the poem, then the reader can't be led astray or disoriented later.
Billy CollinsSome difficulty is warranted and other difficulty I think is gratuitous. And I think I can tell the difference. There are certainly very difficult poets that I really enjoy reading.
Billy CollinsRobert Frost really started this whole thing rolling. He was, I believe, the first poet who started going to colleges. Before that, poets didn't give public readings very often, certainly not - there was no circuit of schools.
Billy CollinsThere 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 CollinsI thought originally when I was in school and I wanted to be a poet, I knew that poets seemed to be miserable.
Billy CollinsI love to move like a mouse inside this puzzle for the body, balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found.
Billy Collins