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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The life of Edward Estlin Cummings began with a childhood in Cambridge, Mass., that he described as happy, but he struggled in both his artistic and romantic exploits against the piousness of his father, an esteemed Harvard professor."

"One of the disadvantages of poetry over popular music is that if you write a pop song, it naturally gets into people's heads as they listen in the car. You don't have to memorize a Paul Simon song; it's just in your head, and you can sing along. With a poem, you have to will yourself to memorize it."

"I'm trying to write poems that involve beginning at a known place, and ending up at a slightly different place. I'm trying to take a little journey from one place to another, and it's usually from a realistic place, to a place in the imagination."

"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."

"I think more influential than Emily Dickinson or Coleridge or Wordsworth on my imagination were Warner Brothers, Merrie Melodies, and Loony Tunes cartoons."

"A lasting marriage, they say, is one where the two reach for different sections of the Sunday paper. Me, I go right for the obituaries, just like those very elderly characters in Muriel Spark's spooky novel, 'Memento Mori."

"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."

"If an artist is driven primarily by social responsibility, I think the art probably suffers because, again, just as leadership has a rather defined end point or purpose, social responsibility would seem to have a very clear moral context."

"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."

"Humor, for me, is really a gate of departure. It's a way of enticing a reader into a poem so that less funny things can take place later. It really is not an end in itself, but a means to an end."

"There's something very authentic about humor, when you think about it. Anybody can pretend to be serious. But you can't pretend to be funny."

"I think it’s vital. It’s odd to me because many people say we live in these awful times and we need culture and art especially in times like these, in these dire times. Well, first of all, I don’t think these times are more dire than other times. People who say that just need to go back and read Herodotus, read any book of history, read a biography of Attila the Hun. If people are going to wring their hands over these troubled times, I would think that humor should be indispensable. I find it strange that –at least in my take on it—the people who are the most alarmed about the dire times we live in are the ones who seem to be humorless, in their taste for poetry anyway. Humor is just an ingredient."

"And you are certainly not the pine-scented air. There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air"

"If you look a word up in the dictionary and twenty minutes later you're still wandering around in the dictionary, you probably have the most basic equipment you need to be a poet."

"The whole idea of it makes me feellike I'm coming down with something,something worse than any stomach acheor the headaches I get from reading in bad light--a kind of measles of the spirit,a mumps of the psyche,a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul. You tell me it is too early to be looking back,but that is because you have forgottenthe perfect simplicity of being oneand the beautiful complexity introduced by two. But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit. At four I was an Arabian wizard. I could make myself invisibleby drinking a glass of milk a certain way. At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince. But now I am mostly at the windowwatching the late afternoon light. Back then it never fell so solemnlyagainst the side of my tree house,and my bicycle never leaned against the garageas it does today,all the dark blue speed drained out of it. This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,as I walk through the universe in my sneakers. It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,time to turn the first big number. It seems only yesterday I used to believethere was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I could shine. But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,I skin my knees. I bleed."