Billy Collins
Billy Collins
William James "Billy" Collinsis an American poet, appointed as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. He is a Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York and is the Senior Distinguished Fellow of the Winter Park Institute, Florida. Collins was recognized as a Literary Lion of the New York Public Libraryand selected as the New York State Poet for 2004 through 2006. He isa teacher in the MFA program at Stony Brook...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth22 March 1941
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
I don't think I've ever written a poem whose intention was just to be funny. I've written poems that start out funny and often shift into something more serious.
When I write, I'm not trying to be funny. It's the way I look at the world.
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.
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.
Death is what makes life fun.
Humor, for me, is really a gate of departure. It's 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.
There's something very authentic about humor, when you think about it. Anybody can pretend to be serious. But you can't pretend to be funny.
Discovering Samuel Beckett in college was a big deal for me. I realized you could be very funny and very dark at the same time.
Besides the aesthetics, besides teaching an appreciation of T.S. Eliot, a basic need is fulfilled when you teach English at CUNY.
When you put a poem on a Kindle, the lines are broken in order to fit on the screen. And so instead of being the poet's decision, it becomes the device's decision.
When I was a young man, I understood that poetry was two things - it was difficult to understand, but you could understand that the poet was miserable. So for a while there, I wrote poems that were hard to understand, even by me, but gave off whiffs of misery.
When I discovered the lyric poem, that advanced not by narrative steps but by blocks and layers of imagery, I said, 'Gee, I probably could do that. So let me try that.'
We love, you know, children love the ingredients of poetry. And then they go into this tunnel that we call adolescence, and when they come out of it, they hate poetry.
To a poet, it's quite ruinous to have a poem distorted, out of shape, or squeezed, shall we say, into this tiny screen. But I'm not sure big digital companies are sensitive to the needs of poets.