Billy Collins

"You will always be the bread and the knife, not to mention the crystal goblet and—somehow—the wine."

"Marginalia Sometimes the notes are ferocious,skirmishes against the authorraging along the borders of every pagein tiny black script. If I could just get my hands on you,Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,they seem to say,I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head. Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -Nonsense. Please! HA!! -that kind of thing. I remember once looking up from my reading,my thumb as a bookmark,trying to imagine what the person must look likewho wrote Don't be a ninnyalongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson. Students are more modestneeding to leave only their splayed footprintsalong the shore of the page. One scrawls Metaphor next to a stanza of Eliot's. Another notes the presence of Ironyfifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal. Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,Hands cupped around their mouths. Absolutely, they shoutto Duns Scotus and James Baldwin. Yes. Bull's-eye. My man!Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation pointsrain down along the sidelines. And if you have managed to graduate from collegewithout ever having written Man vs. Naturein a margin, perhaps nowis the time to take one step forward. We have all seized the white perimeter as our ownand reached for a pen if only to showwe did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;we pressed a thought into the wayside,planted an impression along the verge. Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoriajotted along the borders of the Gospelsbrief asides about the pains of copying,a bird singing near their window,or the sunlight that illuminated their page-anonymous men catching a ride into the futureon a vessel more lasting than themselves. And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,they say, until you have read himenwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling. Yet the one I think of most often,the one that dangles from me like a locket,was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye I borrowed from the local libraryone slow, hot summer. I was just beginning high school then,reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,and I cannot tell youhow vastly my loneliness was deepened,how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,when I found on one page A few greasy looking smearsand next to them, written in soft pencil-by a beautiful girl, I could tell,whom I would never meet-Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."

"“Marginalia Sometimes the notes are ferocious,skirmishes against the authorraging along the borders of every pagein tiny black script. If I could just get my hands on you,Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,they seem to say,I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head. Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -Nonsense. Please! HA!! -that kind of thing. I remember once looking up from my reading,my thumb as a bookmark,trying to imagine what the person must look likewho wrote Don't be a ninnyalongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson. Students are more modestneeding to leave only their splayed footprintsalong the shore of the page. One scrawls Metaphor next to a stanza of Eliot's. Another notes the presence of Ironyfifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal. Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,Hands cupped around their mouths. Absolutely, they shoutto Duns Scotus and James Baldwin. Yes. Bull's-eye. My man!Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation pointsrain down along the sidelines. And if you have managed to graduate from collegewithout ever having written Man vs. Naturein a margin, perhaps nowis the time to take one step forward. We have all seized the white perimeter as our ownand reached for a pen if only to showwe did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;we pressed a thought into the wayside,planted an impression along the verge. Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoriajotted along the borders of the Gospelsbrief asides about the pains of copying,a bird singing near their window,or the sunlight that illuminated their page-anonymous men catching a ride into the futureon a vessel more lasting than themselves. And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,they say, until you have read himenwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling. Yet the one I think of most often,the one that dangles from me like a locket,was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye I borrowed from the local libraryone slow, hot summer. I was just beginning high school then,reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,and I cannot tell youhow vastly my loneliness was deepened,how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,when I found on one page A few greasy looking smearsand next to them, written in soft pencil-by a beautiful girl, I could tell,whom I would never meet-Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.”"

"“You will always be the bread and the knife, not to mention the crystal goblet and—somehow—the wine.”"

"Some honor Cummings as the granddaddy of all American innovators in poetry and ascribe to him a diverse progeny that includes virtually any poet who considers the page a field and allows silence to be part of poetry's expressiveness."

"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."

"I'm all for poetry catching up with technology, and just as there are i Tunes, I think we should have i Poems. I mean, people should be able to walk around with their earbuds in and listening to poems on their i Pod."

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

"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."

"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."

"When I became poet laureate, I was in a slightly uncomfortable position because I think a lot of poetry isn't worth reading."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"In the long revolt against inherited forms that has by now become the narrative of 20th-century poetry in English, no poet was more flamboyant or more recognizable in his iconoclasm than Cummings."

"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."