I write quickly -- I can finish a poem in forty-five minutes, sometimes less. Then you go back to make it dance a little better.Eighty percent of revision is rhythmical – making changes to make the right music.
Eventually, I go to the computer – you can look and see the lines that don’t work. You move furniture.
-- Billy Collins –
Have a great Friday!
Billy Collins has made so many of my days brighter (encountering himself during his two tenures as US Poet Laureate the highlights).
ReplyDeleteHere his
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.
-
Makes my smile.
(Cip, please erase this comment, if you feel uncomfortable about having a poem here. Thanks.)