Best quotes by Billy Collins on Poetry

Checkout quotes by Billy Collins on Poetry

• ‟ Poetry 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
  

• ‟ Radio is such a perfect medium for the transmission of poetry, primarily because there just is the voice, there's no visual distraction.

  - Billy Collins
  

• ‟ My persona is less miserable than a lot of contemporary poetry speakers are.

  - Billy Collins
  

• ‟ I find a lot of poetry very disappointing, but I do have poets that I go back to. One book of poetry that I'd like to mention is 'The Exchange' by Sophie Cabot Black. Her poems are difficult without being too difficult.

  - Billy Collins
  

• ‟ For most Americans, poetry plays no role in their everyday lives. But also for most Americans, contemporary painting or jazz or sculpture play no role either. I'm not saying poetry is singled out as a special thing to ignore.

  - Billy Collins
  

• ‟ The 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
  

• ‟ Often 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
  

• ‟ There 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
  

• ‟ Listeners 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
  

• ‟ I'm pretty much all for poetry in public places - poetry on buses, poetry on subways, on billboards, on cereal boxes.

  - Billy Collins
  

• ‟ Poetry 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
  

• ‟ I 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
  

• ‟ We 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
  

• ‟ I 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
  

• ‟ I don't think anybody reads a book of poetry front to back. Editors and reviewers only. I don't think anybody else does.

  - Billy Collins
  

• ‟ 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.

  - Billy Collins
  

• ‟ 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.

  - Billy Collins
  

• ‟ I 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
  

• ‟ 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.

  - Billy Collins