A Quote by Billy Collins
I think my poems are slightly underrated by the word 'accessible.'
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I think my poems are slightly underrated by the word accessible.
The spoken word community was significant in making me want to write accessible and urgent poems. Bob Holman, in particular, was an impressive figure.
I think the word respect is underrated.
In terms of the production company, my brother and I are very drawn toward projects that do feel slightly outside the box. And at the same time are accessible enough that they could draw a slightly wider audience.
Humor is essential to survival. Funny poems are vastly underrated. Very underwritten.
I don't think all poems need to be written in conversational language - those are often great poems but there should also be poems of incoherent bewilderment and muddled mystery.
I think it would be pompous to say I am an underrated actor. I don't think it is for me to think and decide; it is for people to decide. But I am glad I am underrated than being overrated - that is something I would find hard to digest.
Sports is remarkably cognitive. I think it's underrated just how smart it is. Actually, if I had more time, I would spend more time with sports. Watching it, reading about it, I think it's oddly underrated.
If you want to write poetry, you must have poems that deeply move you. Poems you can't live without. I think of a poem as the blood in a blood transfusion, given from the heart of the poet to the heart of the reader. Seek after poems that live inside you, poems that move through your veins.
I don't think I did write any poems to fill narrative gaps. Not consciously, anyway. As much as possible, I try to discover my poems' subject matter through the act of writing, instead of deciding ahead of time what my poems will be about.
Anything important has to be almost invisible. And underrated. So the understructure should be underrated, but strong enough to hold the earth.
A lot of people I know hate Paul McCartney in general. I guess I understand, but I'm a fan. I think he's a little underrated in my peer group - unlike John Lennon. He's not my favorite Beatle, but he's a goddamn good songwriter and he makes a lot of really cheesy, schmaltzy stuff but he's still underrated.
I think that the casual reader and the lyric and confession are trickily tied up together. I mean often when I read my students' poems my first impulse is to say, "O, the subject of this pronoun, this 'I,' is whatever kid wrote this poem." The audience for lyric poems is "confessionalized" to some extent. And I think this audience tends to find long narrative poems, for instance, kind of bewildering.
I think you can perform any poem. But what I believe is that the best examples of spoken word poetry I've ever seen, are spoken word poems that, when you see them, you're aware of the fact they need to be performed. That there's something about that poem that you would not be able to understand if you were just reading it on a piece of paper.
Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.
When I worked on a magazine, I learned that there are many, many writers writing that can't write at all; and they keep on writing all the cliches and bromides and 1890 plots, and poems about Spring and poems about Love, and poems they think are modern because they are done in slang or staccato style, or written with all the 'i's' small.
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