Billy Collins Quotes

There have always been poets who performed. Blake sang his Songs of Innocence and Experience to parties of friends.

Poetry has never been a favorite American pastime.

Anything I can sing, I call a song. Anything I can't sing, I call a poem.

Why do you need a voice when you have a verse?

Ideally, I'd like to write poetry for public performances and prose for a different, more contemplative kind of consumption.

I was always into poetry and writing. So the urgency of spoken word is something that really has always appealed to me.

I love poetry and I've kept everything I've written.

I'm reading a lot of poetry because it's a lot easier to dip in and dip out when you've got 10 minutes to yourself.

I've written poetry most of my life.

I've always felt that poetry was particularly erotic, more than prose was... I say that you read poems not with your eyes and not with your ears, but with your mouth. You taste it.

When it comes to poetry, I think partly the numbers of people attempting to write poems is probably a result or the reaction to technology.

The poet is like the wise fool or like a version of the stand-up, because we're standing, we're doing stand-up. That's exactly what we're doing.

I stalk certain words... I catch them in mid-flight, as they buzz past, I trap them, clean them, peel them, I set myself in front of the dish, they have a crystalline texture to me, vibrant, ivory, vegetable, oily, like fruit, like algae, like agates, like olives... I stir them, I shake them, I drink them, I gulp them down, I mash them, I garnish them... I leave them in my poem like stalactites, like slivers of polished wood, like coals, like pickings from a shipwreck, gifts from the waves... Everything exists in the word.

I want to see the thirst inside the syllables I want to touch the fire in the sound: I want to feel the darkness of the cry. I want words as rough as virgin rocks.” - Verb.

Poetry is a tracing of the trajectories of a finite sound to the infinite points of its echoes.

For me, the poetry in a work is that which makes visible the invisible.

I'm an actress, primarily. I love to write poetry. I've been writing poetry since I was 12 years old.

My writing just kind of exists out there in the air-it's all sort of intended as spoken, or sung, word. So, to commit them to the page...that way was kind of intimidating to me, yet intriguing, to try to reflect the rhythms and connotations and emotions that you can deliver, speaking-wise, on a page.

Poetry is the renewal of words, setting them free, and that's what a poet is doing: loosening the words.

Poems don't have to rhyme... Poems are about beauty and emotion; in other words poems are about feelings.

The primary pigment of poetry is the IMAGE.

Sir, what is poetry? Why, Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is; but it is not easy to tell what it is.

Poetry is the most concentrated form of literature; it is the most emotionalized and powerful way in which thought can be presented.

The reverie we intend to study is poetic reverie. This is a reverie which poetry puts on the right track, the track an expanding consciousness follows. This reverie is written, or, at least, promises to be written. It is already facing the great universe of the blank page. Then images begin to compose and fall into place.

Poetry has become the higher algebra of metaphors.