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'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.
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.
I'm happy to stick with my persona. There are themes of love lost and love regained, but the main themes of all poems are basically love and death, and that seems to be the message of poetry.
Cummings' career as a writer - and a painter - was as wobbly as his love life. He tried his hand at playwriting, satirical essays, and even a dance scenario for Lincoln Kirsten.
Besides the aesthetics, besides teaching an appreciation of T.S. Eliot, a basic need is fulfilled when you teach English at CUNY.
I think more people should be reading it but maybe fewer people should be writing it, ... there's an abundance of unreadable poetry out there.
Bugs Bunny is my muse.
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.
High School is the place where poetry goes to die.
I was able to read poets that were - allowed me to be humorous without being silly.
I was a pretty happy kid, I had to fake it. I had to get into this miserable character before I wrote poems.
I thought originally when I was in school and I wanted to be a poet, I knew that poets seemed to be miserable.
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.
...pleasure, of course, is a slippery word.... Our pleasures ultimately belong to us, not to the pleasure's source.