Billy Collins Quotes

Billy Collins is the class clown in the
schoolhouse of American poetry. It’s earned
him a rare spot between critical respect and
wide appeal. A member of the academy (though
he may throw stones) he teaches in writing
programs like CUNY and Columbia--yet he is also
read widely even by non-poets. It's not uncommon
for three of his books to appear simultaneously
on the Poetry Foundation’s bestseller list,
and he shatters the cliche that poets must
be poor in their own lifetimes; his 2001
Sailing Alone Around the Room is rumored
to have earned him a million-dollar advance.
(Collins's publishers have confirmed that
it was at least six figures.)




Billy Collins: I would say it was a fairly
happy childhood. But they say he who says that
is just better at repressing things. In fact,
I think Howard Nemerov… or somebody said that
you didn’t need to suffer extraordinarily to be
a writer because adolescence itself is suffering
enough. But factually, I was an only child, a very
late child, born to parents who were both 39 at
the time, which was very late back then. That kind
of confirmed my sense of being the center of the
universe, which I guess every child feels—children
and poets both tend to feel. What else? I went to
a lot of Catholic schooling. I went to kindergarten
in a public school and then I went immediately
into Catholic first grade and stayed there—not
in first grade but Catholic institutions—all
the way through college—I went to a Jesuit college—
and finally returned to secular education not
until I went to graduate school at the University
of California. That’s a quick ride through my
childhood.

Billy Collins: And that’s when it began, and it
continued. I mean, it’s kind of a long story,
but it continued through the throes of adolescence.
And in that period I was writing kind of covert,
dark, wounded, misunderstood—I would say Gothic—
poetry. Bad, you know—terrible. And then I suddenly
came under the influence of, first of all, people
like Karl Shapiro and Howard Nemerov and Reed
Whittemore and a lot of other contemporary poets
that I was exposed to only because for some
complicated reasons my father used to bring
Poetry magazine home. And so I got to hear not
just school voices, like William Cullen Bryant
and John Greenleaf Whittier and all these
extremely dead guys, but the voice of living
poets that rang with speech and sounded like talk.
And that was my first exposure to I guess what
modern poetry was.

And then there was just a series of influences.
I was influenced by the Beats because I actually
just began to commit adolescence around 1955,
when “Howl” and Rebel Without a Cause and a lot
of other new things were popping up. (Again I’m
trying to give you a finite version of this career.)
And then I came under the sway of Wallace Stevens
when I was in college and graduate school, and
basically set as a life goal the ambition of
writing third-rate Wallace Stevens. I thought I
would be completely content if I was recognized
at some later point in my life as a third-rate
Wallace Stevens.

Billy Collins: There’s this pet phrase about
writing that is bandied around particularly in
workshops about “finding your own voice as a poet”,
which I suppose means that you come out from under
the direct influence of other poets and have perhaps
found a way to combine those influences so that it
appears to be your own voice. But I think you could
also put it a different way. You, quote, find your
voice, unquote, when you are able to invent this one
character who resembles you, obviously, and probably
is more like you than anyone else on earth, but is
not the equivalent to you.

It is like a fictional character in that it has a very
distinctive voice, a voice that seems to be able to
accommodate and express an attitude that you are
comfortable staying with but an attitude that is
flexible enough to cover a number of situations. The
character I invented, if I had to describe him, is
probably an updating of a character you find strolling
through the pages of English Romantic poetry. He is a
daydreamer, obviously unemployed, plenty of time on his
hands, spends a lot of time by himself, and has an
unhealthy fascination with his thinking process, his
own speculations and fantasies. So he is not a really
new character. He is kind of a remodeling of this
earlier Romantic character, the poet who would find
himself daydreaming on a wayside bench somewhere.

Billy Collins: The change came I would say when I
began to dare to be clear, because I think clarity is
the real risk in poetry because you are exposed.
You’re out in the open field. You’re actually
saying things that are comprehensible, and it’s easy
to criticize something you can understand. But I
think when I transitioned to a poetry that was
clearer, it really was about shifting influences.
I started moving away from poets like Wallace
Stevens and Hart Crane and started reading poets
like, again, Karl Shapiro, Howard Nemerov, Philip
Larkin, and the British poets who were imported
through that important anthology put together by
Alvarez—and those would include Thom Gunn and
Ted Hughes. And I think these poets gave me
assurance that there were other ways to write
besides the rather involuted style of high
modernism whose high priests were Pound,
Eliot and Stevens, and Crane perhaps.

Billy Collins: The literary world is so full
of pretension, and there’s such an enormous gap
between how seriously poets take themselves and
how widely they’re ignored by everybody else. So
I appointed myself the poet who’s gonna feel free
to take potshots at the whole enterprise.

Billy Collins: Poems are not easy to start, and
they’re not easy to finish. There’s a great pleasure
in—I wouldn’t say ease, but maybe kind of a fascinated
ease that accompanies the actual writing of the poem.
I find it very difficult to get started. There are
just long gaps where I can’t find a point of
insertion, I can’t find a good opening line,
I can’t find a mood that I want to write into.
But once I do, once a line falls out of the air,
or I get a little inkling of a subject and I
recognize that, it’s like the sense that a game
has started. Part of writing is discovering the
rules of the game and then deciding whether to
follow the rules or to break them. The great thing
about the game of poetry is that it’s always your
turn—I guess that goes back to my being an only
child. So once it’s under way, there is a sense
of flow. Usually the poems are written in one
sitting. There’s always a groping towards some
satisfying ending. But I’d say the hardest part
is not writing. Once the writing starts, it’s
too pleasurable to think of it as a difficulty.

Billy Collins: I’m speaking to someone I’m trying
to get to fall in love with me. I’m trying to speak
intimately to one person. That should be clear. I’m
not speaking to an audience. I’m not writing for the
podium. I’m just writing, trying to write in a fairly
quiet tone to one other reader who is by herself, or
himself, and I’m trying to interrupt some silence in
their life, which is utterance. I don’t really have
a picture of this person. But as soon as I start to
write I’m very aware, I’m trying to be aware that a
reader just might well pick up this poem, a stranger.
So when I’m writing—and I think that this is important
for all writers— I’m trying to be a writer and a reader
back and forth. I write two lines or three lines. I will
immediately stop and turn into a reader instead of a
writer, and I’ll read those lines as if I had never
seen them before and as if I had never written them.
And if they still make sense and if they still have
good cadence and if there’s something interesting
going on there, then I’ll go forward, turn back into
the writer, and write another two or three or six
lines, and then go back and bring the reader out
and see what he thinks of it.

Billy Collins: I write one line at a time. I’m a
line-maker. I think that’s what makes poets different
from prose-writers. That’s the main way. We think,
not just in sentences the way prose writers do but
also in lines. So we’re doing these two things at
the same time. When I’m constructing a poem, I’m
trying to write one good line after another. One
solid line after another. You know a lot of the
lines—some hold up better as lines than others.
But I’m not thinking of just writing a paragraph
and then chopping it up. I’m very conscious of the
fact that every line should have a cadence to it.
It should contribute to the progress of the poem.
And that the ending of the line is a way of turning
the reader’s attention back into the interior
of the poem.