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.

— Billy Collins

My persona is less miserable than a lot of contemporary poetry speakers are.

— Billy Collins

No one here likes a wet dog.

— Billy Collins

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.

— Billy Collins

One of the disadvantages of poetry over popular music is that if you write a pop song, it naturally gets into people's heads as they listen in the car. You don't have to memorize a Paul Simon song; it's just in your head, and you can sing along. With a poem, you have to will yourself to memorize it.

— Billy Collins

People think of poetry as a school subject... Poetry is very frustrating to students because they don't have a taste for ambiguity, for one thing. That gives them a poetry hangover.

— Billy Collins

Perhaps the answer is simply one:one female angel dancing alone in her stocking feet, a small jazz combo working in the background. She sways like a branch in the wind, her beautiful eyes closed, and the tall thin bassist leans overt glance at his watch because she has been dancing forever, and now it is very late, even for musicians.

— Billy Collins

Poetry can do a lot of things to people. I mean it can improve your imagination. It can take you to new places. It can give you this incredible form of verbal pleasure.

— Billy Collins

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.

— Billy Collins

Radio is such a perfect medium for the transmission of poetry, primarily because there just is the voice, there's no visual distraction.

— Billy Collins