Billy Collins Quotes

What is the poem, after it is written? That is the question. Not where it came from or why.

If the book is a mystery to its author as she's writing, inevitably it's going to be a mystery to the reader as he or she reads it.

The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.

I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.

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.

I learn a lot about my poems when I read them by the way people respond to them.

It can be dismaying, all the same, for a novelist to compare the slowness of the writing with the speed of the reading. Novels are read in a matter of days, even hours. A writer may labor for weeks over a particular passage that will have its effect on a reader for an instant - and that effect may be subliminal or barely noticed.

I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.

I make it clear why I write as I do and why other poets write as they do. After hundreds of experiments I decided to go my own way in style and see what would happen.

It is the job of the novelist to touch the reader.

I'd never really been content with just churning out these slim volumes every three or four years. I've always tried to think of poetry as an active ingredient in the language rather than just something that appears between the covers of thin books.

I think that you have to keep the reader front and centre if you're going to write something that people are going to love and be entertained by.

Nobody really knows whether they are a poet. I knew I was interested from the age of 15.

I really love being a weirdo who writes a lot of different things for a lot of different ages. I have been considering doing a guide on my website so that a reader who liked one of my books could find the other books that he or she might like, because I know some of the books are really different from the rest.

I would not say I chose to write long poems on a conscious level. The long poem has been a relative constant.

I see the shape of the poem before I start writing, and the writing is just the process of arriving at the shape.

My poems tend to be more celebratory and lyrical, and the novels so far pretty dark. Poetry doesn't seem to me to be an appropriate tool for exploring that.

I think there is a poem out there for everyone, to be an entrance into the poetry and a relationship with it.

I feel like I am in the service of the poem. The poem isn't something I make. The poem is something I serve.

From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.

What I try to do is to go into a poem - and one writes them, of course, poem by poem - to go into each poem, first of all without having any sense whatsoever of where it's going to end up.

Almost anything is too much. I am trying in my poems to have the reader be the experiencer. I do not want to be there. It is not even a walk we take together.

In the end, my reasons for moving down the timeline and introducing a new cast have more to do with keeping myself entertained, on the assumption that if I get bored, my readers are going to be even more bored.

It's funny: I like being surprised as a reader, so it's difficult for me to spoil my own stuff.

It seems to me that readers sometimes make the genesis of a poem more mysterious than it is (by that I perhaps mean, think of it as something outside their own experience).