A Quote by Billy Collins

Introduction To Poetry I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem's room and feel the walls for a light switch. I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author's name on the shore. But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.

Billy Collins

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Across Against Ask Author Beating Begin Chair Color Confession Drop Ear Feel Find Him His His Way Hive Hold Hose Inside Introduction Light Like Means Mouse Name Out Poem Poetry Press Probe Really Really Mean Room Rope Say Shore Slide Surface Switch Take Them Tie Torture Up Walk Walls Want Watch Waving Way

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Billy Collins
American - Poet
Born: March 22, 1941

All they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with a rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.

Billy Collins

I think that poetry is an act of celebration, that anytime you're writing a poem, it means that you're celebrating something, even if it's a sad poem, if it's an angry poem, a political poem or anything at all. The fact that you're taking the time and energy to pick up this thing and hold it to the light, and say, "Let's take some time to consider this," means that you've deemed it worthy enough to spend time on - which, in my opinion, is celebrating.

Sarah Kay

I want to reiterate that my understanding of the poem is not the poem's core, true meaning. Once a poem goes out into the world, the poet is just one more reader.

James Arthur

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.

Paul Muldoon

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

Paul Muldoon

A good poem is not completely a poem until it has received a critical response that grows out of the poem in an almost biological way.

Michael Longley

The subject of the poem usually dictates the rhythm or the rhyme and its form. Sometimes, when you finish the poem and you think the poem is finished, the poem says, "You're not finished with me yet," and you have to go back and revise, and you may have another poem altogether. It has its own life to live.

Maya Angelou

Readers have to be sought out and won to the light of the page, poem by poem, one by one by one.

C.D. Wright

Things that I have a hard time being able to fully grasp, sometimes writing the poem helps me work through it. Or I get to the end of the poem and I still haven't figured anything out, but at least I have a new poem out of it.

Sarah Kay

Sometimes the only way I know how to work through something is by writing a poem. And sometimes I get to the end of the poem and look back and go, 'Oh, that's what this is all about,' and sometimes I get to the end of the poem and haven't solved anything, but at least I have a new poem out of it.

Sarah Kay

Often when I write poetry I don't quite know what I'm saying myself. I mean, I can't restate the poem. The meaning of the poem is the poem.

Pattiann Rogers

For poetry is, I believe, always an act of the spirit. The poem teaches us something while we make it. The poem makes you as you make the poem, and your making of the poem requires all your capacities of thought, feeling, analysis, and synthesis.

May Sarton

Do not wait for a poem; a poem is too fast for you. Do not wait for the poem; run with the poem and then write the poem.

Juan Felipe Herrera

One day while studying a Yeats poem I decided to write poetry the rest of my life. I recognized that a single short poem has room for history, music, psychology, religious thought, mood, occult speculation, character, and events of one's own life. I still feel surprised that such various substances can find shelter and nourishment in a poem. A poem in fact may be a sort of nourishing liquid, such as one uses to keep an amoeba alive. If prepared right, a poem can keep an image or a thought or insights on history or the psyche alive for years, as well as our desires and airy impulses.

Robert Bly

A successful poem says what a poet wants to say, and more, with particular finality. The remarks he makes about his poems are incidental when the poem is good, or embarrassing or absurd when it is bad and he is not permitted to say how the good poem is good, and may never know how the bad poem is bad. It is better to write about other people's poetry.

Randall Jarrell

Poetry has no goal other than itself; it can have no other, and no poem will be so great, so noble, so truly worthy of the name of poem, than one written uniquely for the pleasure of writing a poem.

Charles Baudelaire

A Quote by Billy Collins

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