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I Try To Presume That No One Is Interested In Me. And I Think Experience Bears That Out. No One's Interested In The Experiences Of A Stranger - Let's Put It That Way. And Then You Have Difficulty Combined With Presumptuousness, Which Is The Most Dire Trouble With Poetry.

-Billy Collins

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I Try To Presume

Billy Collins

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I Try To Presume That No One Is Interested In Me. And I Think Experience Bears That Out. No One's Interested In The Experiences Of A Stranger - Let's Put It That Way. And Then You Have Difficulty Combined With Presumptuousness, Which Is The Most Dire Trouble With Poetry.

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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.

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.

I Love To Move Like A Mouse Inside This Puzzle For The Body, Balancing The Wish To Be Lost With The Need To Be Found.

It Seems Only Yesterday I Used To Believe There Was Nothing Under My Skin But Light. If You Cut Me I Could Shine.

I Could Feel The Day Offering Itself To Me, And I Wanted Nothing More Than To Be In The Moment-but Which Moment? Not That One, Or That One, Or That One.

I Knew That Poets Seemed To Be Miserable.

I Think A Good Poem Should Have Some Inscrutable Part. You Can't Quite Explain It. The Poem Can Only Explain Itself To A Certain Limit And At That Point You Enter Into A Little Bit Of Mystery. That For Me Is The Perfect Poem: To Begin In Clarity And To End In Mystery.

More Often Than Not In Poetry I Find Difficulty To Be Gratuitous And Show-offy And Camouflaging, Experimental To A Kind Of Insane Degree - A Difficulty Which Really Ignores The Possibility Of Having A Sensible Reader.

Life Is A Loaded Gun That Looks Right At You With A Yellow Eye.

A Motto I've Adopted Is, If At First You Don't Succeed, Hide All Evidence That You Ever Tried.

Bugs Bunny Is My Muse.

I Thought Originally When I Was In School And I Wanted To Be A Poet, I Knew That Poets Seemed To Be Miserable.

I Write With A Uni-ball Onyx Micropoint On Nine-by-seven Bound Notebooks Made By A Canadian Company Called Blueline. After I Do A Few Drafts, I Type Up The Poem On A Macintosh G3 And Then Send It Out The Door.

You Know How Sometimes You Just Have A Memory Of Looking Up And Seeing A Face Looking Over Your Crib And Then Remember Nothing Until Tenth Grade? - I Have One Of These Early Memories Where I'm In The Back Of My Parents' Car, A Place I Loved To Spend A Lot Of Time As An Only Child, Not Having To Fight With Venomous Siblings Over The Only Toy.

I Just Think That The World Of Workshops - I've Written A Poem That Is A Parody Of Workshop Talk, I've Written A Poem That Is A Kind Of Parody Of A Garrulous Poet At A Poetry Reading Who Spends An Inordinate Amount Of Time Explaining The Poem Before Reading It, I've Written A Number Of Satirical Poems About Other Poets.

But Tomorrow, Dawn Will Come The Way I Picture Her, Barefoot And Disheveled, Standing Outside My Window In One Of The Fragile Cotton Dresses Of The Poor. She Will Look In At Me With Her Thin Arms Extended, Offering A Handful Of Birdsong And A Small Cup Of Light.

Until Recently, I Thought 'occasional Poetry' Meant That You Wrote Only Occasionally.

I See Woefully Obscure Poetry As Simply A Kind Of Verbal Rudeness.

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.

There's A Lot Of Unconscious Activity That Goes On I Think In The Composition Of A Poem.

When You Get A Poem [in A Public Place], It Happens To You So Suddenly That You Don't Have Time To Deploy Your Anti-poetry Deflector Shields That Were Installed In High School.

It's A Good Thing To Get Poetry Off The Shelves And More Into Public Life.

And I Should Mention The Light Which Falls Through The Big Windows This Time Of Day Italicizing Everything It Touches.

I Could Look At You Forever And Never See The Two Of Us Together

I Try To Presume That No One Is Interested In Me. And I Think Experience Bears That Out. No One's Interested In The Experiences Of A Stranger - Let's Put It That Way. And Then You Have Difficulty Combined With Presumptuousness, Which Is The Most Dire Trouble With Poetry.

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.

I Can Hear The Library Humming In The Night, A Choir Of Authors Murmuring Inside Their Books Along The Unlit, Alphabetical Shelves, Giovanni Pontano Next To Pope, Dumas Next To His Son, Each One Stitched Into His Own Private Coat, Together Forming A Low, Gigantic Chord Of Language.

I Felt At Some Point That I Had Nothing To Lose, And [laughs] Maybe I Was Wrong. I Think, You Know, There's Always These Little Autobiographical Secrets Behind Things. I Think I Was Really Attacking My Earlier Self, And This Kind Of Pretentious Figure.

The Really Authentic Thing About Humor Is That Anyone Can Pretend To Be Serious. Anyone Who's Ever Had A Job - In Fact, We're Pretending To Be Serious Now, More Or Less.

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.

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.

Particularly When I Thought Of Myself As A Wallace Stevens Acolyte, I Wrote Very Difficult Poetry And I Was Really Guilty Of Not Knowing What I Was Talking About. I Was Going For A Kind Of Clever Verbal Effect. I Was Trying To Sound Linguistically Or Verbally Interesting. I Had A Sense, I Guess, From Just Reading A Lot Of Poetry Of How A Poem Would Start And How It Would End But Really I Didn't Know What I Was Doing. It Had Very Little Connection To My Life.

Robert Frost Really Started This Whole Thing Rolling. He Was, I Believe, The First Poet Who Started Going To Colleges. Before That, Poets Didn't Give Public Readings Very Often, Certainly Not - There Was No Circuit Of Schools.

It Is As If One By One, The Memories You Used To Harbor Decided To Retire To The Southern Hemisphere Of The Brain.

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.

Radio Is Such A Perfect Medium For The Transmission Of Poetry, Primarily Because There Just Is The Voice, There's No Visual Distraction.

I Think What Gets A Poem Going Is An Initiating Line. Sometimes A First Line Will Occur, And It Goes Nowhere; But Other Times - And This, I Think, Is A Sense You Develop - I Can Tell That The Line Wants To Continue. If It Does, I Can Feel A Sense Of Momentum - The Poem Finds A Reason For Continuing.

…balancing The Wish To Be Lost With The Need To Be Found.

I Can't Picture Myself Starting Out Aiming To Do Anything Or Having Much Of An Agenda.i Think In Writing A Poem, I'm Making Some Tonal Adjustments, And It Took Me A Long Time To Allow Anything Like Fun Into My Poetry.

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.

Falling In Love

The Trouble With Poetry Is That It Encourages The Writing Of More Poetry.

I Was A Pretty Happy Kid, I Had To Fake It. I Had To Get Into This Miserable Character Before I Wrote Poems.

There Are Interesting Forms Of Difficulty, And There Are Unprofitable Forms Of Difficulty. I Mean, I Enjoy Some Difficult Poetry, But Some Of It Is Impenetrable And I Actually Wouldn't Want To Penetrate It If I Could, Perhaps.

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.

But Tonight, The Lion Of Contentment Has Placed A Warm Heavy Paw On My Chest.

...pleasure, Of Course, Is A Slippery Word.... Our Pleasures Ultimately Belong To Us, Not To The Pleasure's Source.

Nationalism Is A Type Of Insanity In Which The Boundaries Of A Land Replace God.

This Is Not What It Is Like To Be You, I Realized As A Few Of Your Magnificent Clouds Flew Over The Rooftop. It Is Just Me Thinking About Being You. And Before I Headed Back Down The Hill, I Walked In A Circle Around Your House, Making An Invisible Line Which You Would Have To Cross Before Dark.

I Was Able To Read Poets That Were - Allowed Me To Be Humorous Without Being Silly.

Poetry Is Like Standing On The Edge Of A Lake On A Moonlit Night And The Light Of The Moon Is Always Pointing Straight At You.

And The Reason I Am Writing This On The Back Of A Manila Envelope Now That They Have Left The Train Together Is To Tell You That When She Turned To Lift The Large, Delicate Cello Onto The Overhead Rack, I Saw Him Looking Up At Her And What She Was Doing The Way The Eyes Of Saints Are Painted When They Are Looking Up At God When He Is Doing Something Remarkable, Something That Identifies Him As God.

In The Process Of Simplifying Oneself, One Often Discovers The Thing Called Voice.

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.

Humor, For Me, Is Really A Gate Of Departure. Its A Way Of Enticing A Reader Into A Poem So That Less Funny Things Can Take Place Later. It Really Is Not An End In Itself, But A Means To An End.

So Many Names, There Is Barely Room On The Walls Of The Heart.

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.

Death Is What Makes Life Fun.

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.

By Clarity I Don't Mean That We're Always In Kind Of A Simple Area Where Everything Is Clear And Comforting And Understood. Clarity Is Certainly A Way Toward Disorientation Because If You Don't Start Out - If The Reader Isn't Grounded, If The Reader Is Disoriented In The Beginning Of The Poem, Then The Reader Can't Be Led Astray Or Disoriented Later.

One Of The Ridiculous Aspects Of Being A Poet Is The Huge Gulf Between How Seriously We Take Ourselves And How Generally We Are Ignored By Everybody Else.

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.

I Always Think W.s. Merwin's Poems Will Last Of Anyone Writing Today. If I Had To Bet On Posterity I Would Bet Merwin. My Poems Could Easily Evaporate. So I Don't Know. If You Find Yourself As A Writer Thinking About Posterity You Should Probably Go Out For A Brisk Walk Or Something.

Finding Yourself

All I Wanted Was To Be A Pea Of Being Inside The Green Pod Of Time.

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.

The Name Of The Author Is The First To Go Followed Obediently By The Title, The Plot, The Heartbreaking Conclusion, The Entire Novel Which Suddenly Becomes One You Have Never Read, Never Even Heard Of, As If, One By One, The Memories You Used To Harbor Decided To Retire To The Southern Hemisphere Of The Brain, To A Little Fishing Village Where There Are No Phones.

You Come By Your Style By Learning What To Leave Out. At First You Tend To Overwrite—embellishment Instead Of Insight. You Either Continue To Write Puerile Bilge, Or You Change. In The Process Of Simplifying Oneself, One Often Discovers The Thing Called Voice.

The Poem Is Not, As Someone Put It, Deflective Of Entry. But The Real Question Is, 'what Happens To The Reader Once He Or She Gets Inside The Poem?' That's The Real Question For Me, Is Getting The Reader Into The Poem And Then Taking The Reader Somewhere, Because I Think Of Poetry As A Kind Of Form Of Travel Writing.

Write The Poem Only You Can Write.

I Think The Pleasure Of Form Is That You Have A Companion With You Besides All The Poetry You Have Ever Read.

But My Heart Is Always Propped Up In A Field On Its Tripod, Ready For The Next Arrow.

The Pen Is An Instrument Of Discovery Rather Than Just A Recording Implement. If You Write A Letter Of Resignation Or Something With An Agenda, You're Simply Using A Pen To Record What You Have Thought Out.

You'll Find I-poetry, You'll Find That You Can Download Poetry, That You Can Stuff Your I-pod With Recorded Poetry. So Just To Answer The Question That Way, I Think That Poetry Is Gonna Catch Up With That Technology Quite Soon.

This Love For Everyday Things, Part Natural From The Wide Eye Of Infancy, Part A Literary Calculation

Everyday Things

I See The Progress Typical In Some Of My Poems As Starting With Something Simple And Moving Into Something More Demanding. This Is Certainly The Pattern Of Weird Poetry.

I See All Of Us Reading Ourselves Away From Ourselves, Straining In Circles Of Light To Find More Light Until The Line Of Words Becomes A Trail Of Crumbs That We Follow Across A Page Of Fresh Snow.

And Strangely Enoughthe Only Emotion I Ever Feel, Is What The Beaver Must Feel, As He Bears Each Stick To His Hidden Construction, Which Creates The Tranquil Pond And Gives The Mallards Somewhere To Paddle, And The Pair Of Swans A Place To Conceal Their Young

I Think My Poems Are Slightly Underrated By The Word Accessible.

Every Day Is For The Thief Is A Vivid, Episodic Evocation Of The Truism That You Can't Go Home Again; But That Doesn't Mean You're Not Free To Try. A Return To His Native Nigeria Plunges Cole's Charming Narrator Into A Tempest Of Chaos, Contradiction, And Kinship In A Place Both Endearingly Familiar And Unnervingly Strange. The Result Is A Tale That Engages And Disturbs.

Another Trouble With Poetry - And I'm Gonna Stop The List At Two - Is The Presence Of Presumptuousness In Poetry, The Sense You Get In A Poem That The Poet Takes For Granted An Interest On The Reader's Part In The Poet's Autobiographical Life, In The Poet's Memories, Problems, Difficulties And Even Minor Perceptions.

I Think My Work Has To Do With A Sense That We Are Attempting, All The Time, To Create A Logical, Rational Path Through The Day. To The Left And Right There Are An Amazing Set Of Distractions That We Usually Can't Afford To Follow. But The Poet Is Willing To Stop Anywhere.

I Hope The Poem, As It Goes On, Gets More Complicated, A Little More Demanding, A Little More Ambiguous Or Speculative, So That We're Drifting Away From The Casual Beginning Of The Poem Into Something A Little More Serious.

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.

Poetry Is My Cheap Means Of Transportation, By The End Of The Poem The Reader Should Be In A Different Place From Where He Started. I Would Like Him To Be Slightly Disoriented At The End, Like I Drove Him Outside Of Town At Night And Dropped Him Off In A Cornfield.

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.

Vade Mecum I Want The Scissors To Be Sharp And The Table Perfectly Level When You Cut Me Out Of My Life And Paste Me In That Book You Always Carry.

While The Novelist Is Banging On His Typewriter, The Poet Is Watching A Fly In The Windowpane.

It's Time To Float On The Waters Of The Night. Time To Wrap My Arms Around This Book And Press It To My Chest, Life Preserver In A Seat Of Unremarkable Men And Women Anonymous Faces On The Street, A Hundred Thousand Unalphabitized Things A Million Forgotten Hours.

High School Is The Place Where Poetry Goes To Die.

Some Difficulty Is Warranted And Other Difficulty I Think Is Gratuitous. And I Think I Can Tell The Difference. There Are Certainly Very Difficult Poets That I Really Enjoy Reading.

But Some Nights, I Must Tell You, I Go Down There After Everyone Has Fallen Asleep. I Swim Back And Forth In The Echoing Blackness. I Sing A Love Song As Well As I Can, Lost For A While In The Home Of The Rain.

The First Line Is The Dna Of The Poem; The Rest Of The Poem Is Constructed Out Of That First Line. A Lot Of It Has To Do With Tone Because Tone Is The Key Signature For The Poem. The Basis Of Trust For A Reader Used To Be Meter And End-rhyme.

One Of These Days I'm-a Make Me A Book Out Of You.

You Will Always Be The Bread And The Knife, Not To Mention The Crystal Goblet And—somehow—the Wine.

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.

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.

Form Is Any Aspect Of A Poem That Encourages It To Stay Whole And Not Drift Off Into Chaos.

I Find It Strange That - At Least In My Take On It - The People Who Are The Most Alarmed About The Dire Times We Live In Are The Ones Who Seem To Be Humorless, In Their Taste For Poetry Anyway. Humor Is Just An Ingredient. It's Always Been In Poetry. It Kind Of Dropped Out Of Poetry I Think During The 19th And Up To The Mid-twentieth Century. But It's Found Its Way Back. And It's Simply An Ingredient.

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.

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.

A Trouble With Poetry Is The Presence Of Presumptuousness In Poetry, The Sense You Get In A Poem That The Poet Takes For Granted An Interest On The Reader's Part In The Poet's Autobiographical Life, In The Poet's Memories, Problems, Difficulties And Even Minor Perceptions. I Try To Presume That No One Is Interested In Me. And I Think Experience Bears That Out. No One's Interested In The Experiences Of A Stranger - Let's Put It That Way. And Then You Have Difficulty Combined With Presumptuousness, Which Is The Most Dire Trouble With Poetry.

Now I Would Say At Any Given Moment In American Life, There Are Probably 45 Poets In Airplanes Vectoring Across The Country Heading Towards...i Don't Know If Anyone's Reading It, But Poets Are Still Flying Around The Country Going From Lectern To Lectern.that Circuitry Has Become Very Well-established.

The Mind Can Be Trained To Relieve Itself On Paper.

I Sit In The Dark And Wait For A Little Flame To Appear At The End Of My Pencil.

To Write Poetry Is To Be Very Alone, But You Always Have The Company Of Your Influences. But You Also Have The Company Of The Form Itself, Which Has A Kind Of Consciousness. I Mean, The Sonnet Will Simply Tell You, That's Too Many Syllables Or That's Too Many Lines Or That's The Wrong Place. So, Instead Of Being Alone, You're In Dialogue With The Form.

Often People, When They're Confronted With A Poem, It's Like Someone Who Keep Saying 'what Is The Meaning Of This? What Is The Meaning Of This?' And That Dulls Us To The Other Pleasures Poetry Offers.

I Stared Up At The Ebbing Quarter Moon And The Stars Scattered Like A Handful Of Salt Across The Faraway Sky.

A Sentence Starts Out Like A Lone Traveler Heading Into A Blizzard At Midnight, Tilting Into The Wind, One Arm Shielding His Face, The Tails Of His Thin Coat Flapping Behind Him.

No One Here Likes A Wet Dog.

I Think More Influential Than Emily Dickinson Or Coleridge Or Wordsworth On My Imagination Were Warner Brothers, Merrie Melodies And Looney Tunes Cartoons.

Listeners Are Kind Of Ambushed... If A Poem Just Happens To Be Said When They're Listening To The Radio. The Listener Doesn't Have Time To Deploy What I Call Their 'poetry Deflector Shields' That Were Installed In High School - There's Little Time To Resist The Poem.

When I Wrote I Took On The Role Of The Despondent And Difficult To Understand Person. Whereas In Life, I Was Easy To Understand, To The Point Of Being Simple-minded Maybe.

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.

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