notes from Billy Collins

to study poetry is to study the history of the human heart

a poem is a design that displaces silence on the page.

Formal poems remind us that the origins of poetry lie in its mnemonic features, in rhythm, end rhyme, assonance, alliteration

but it’s easier to memorize than prose because it does come in lines that are units—a units of thought, units of syntax

 I want graceful lines and graceful sentences. I try to write very simply. The vocabulary is simple, the sentences tend to be quite conventional—subject, verb, object. I try to be very unchallenging in syntax. I want the trip to be one of imagination and not completely of the language

. I want the poem to be an imaginative thrill. To take the reader to an odd place, or a challenging place, or a disorienting place, but to do that with fairly simple language.

If the reader doesn’t feel oriented in the beginning of the poem, he or she can’t be disoriented later

It’s not just Facebook, which is sort of the willing forfeiture of one’s own privacy. The sanctuaries of privacy are so scarce these days. Every banality, from “I’m going out for pizza,” to “JoAnn is passed out on the sofa,” is broadcast to the wide world. I think I read recently that we’re not suffering from an overflow of information—we’ve suffering from an overflow of insignificance

poetry pleasure and the hedonistic reader