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#billy collins
sweatermuppet · 3 months
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billy collins in response to being asked "if you aren't a poet, but were interested in getting started, how would you do that?"
watch the full video here
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sicknessinmotion · 5 months
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on forgetting & remembering. / billy collins — nick flynn — gwendolyn brooks — alex dimitrov — ocean vuong.
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solar-settings · 9 months
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elegy, billy collins // lottie & nat, yellowjackets
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lizormianillustration · 11 months
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give me hares or give me death
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apoemaday · 10 months
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Sonnet
by Billy Collins
All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now, and after this one just a dozen to launch a little ship on love’s storm-tossed seas, then only ten more left like rows of beans. How easily it goes unless you get Elizabethan and insist the iambic bongos must be played and rhymes positioned at the ends of lines, one for every station of the cross. But hang on here wile we make the turn into the final six where all will be resolved, where longing and heartache will find an end, where Laura will tell Petrarch to put down his pen, take off those crazy medieval tights, blow out the lights, and come at last to bed.
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moonstoast · 2 years
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—on childhood
deathless by catherynne m. valente // poison ivy by justin kurland // forest by justin kurland // seven by taylor swift // the florida project (2017) // on turning ten by billy collins // michael sowa // ? // vincent van gogh // don’t you wonder sometimes? by tracy k. smith
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firstfullmoon · 2 years
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franz wright / ada limón / billy collins
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dabiconcordia · 5 months
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Consolation
How agreeable it is not to be touring Italy this summer, wandering her cities and ascending her torrid hilltowns. How much better to cruise these local, familiar streets, fully grasping the meaning of every roadsign and billboard and all the sudden hand gestures of my compatriots.
There are no abbeys here, no crumbling frescoes or famous domes and there is no need to memorize a succession of kings or tour the dripping corners of a dungeon. No need to stand around a sarcophagus, see Napoleon's little bed on Elba, or view the bones of a saint under glass.
How much better to command the simple precinct of home than be dwarfed by pillar, arch, and basilica. Why hide my head in phrase books and wrinkled maps? Why feed scenery into a hungry, one-eyes camera eager to eat the world one monument at a time?
Instead of slouching in a café ignorant of the word for ice, I will head down to the coffee shop and the waitress known as Dot. I will slide into the flow of the morning paper, all language barriers down, rivers of idiom running freely, eggs over easy on the way.
And after breakfast, I will not have to find someone willing to photograph me with my arm around the owner. I will not puzzle over the bill or record in a journal what I had to eat and how the sun came in the window. It is enough to climb back into the car
as if it were the great car of English itself and sounding my loud vernacular horn, speed off down a road that will never lead to Rome, not even Bologna. By Billy Collins
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sashayed · 1 year
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In All the Excitement I Forgot to Ask His Name
In the middle of a walk across San Diego’s famed Balboa Park one damp, sea-soaked morning, I was politely introduced
by a woman in a blue jogging suit to the third fastest whippet in America, a young, wiry, white and tan creature crouching tensely by her side.
He can cover 200 yards in 11 seconds and crosses the tape at 35 miles per hour, she told me, as we stood under an enormous eucalyptus tree.
The dog was paying no attention. He was staring straight ahead across what looked like 200 yards of open lawn, restrained by a special leather leash.
Young, wiry, white and tan, poised at the end of a century of breeding, his tail was coiled under his belly, he had 11 seconds dancing in his eyes.
Billy Collins in Poetry, May 2003
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fishingforwords · 9 months
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what else am i forgetting?
fernando pessoa, the book of disquiet: the complete edition || arturo ferrari, in the old street vicolo san bernardino alle ossa a milano || madisen kuhn, please don't go before i get better || james bay, let it go || imagine dragons, i was me || holly black, the cruel prince || amazon || billy collins, forgetfulness || salvador dali, disintegration of the persistence of memory
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Look in art: Sun Yuan & Peng Yu
Sun Yuan [born 1972] and Peng Yu [born 1974] are artists living and working collaboratively in Beijing.
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Billy Collins, “The Afterlife” →
They’re moving off in all imaginable directions,
each according to his own private belief, and this is the secret that silent Lazarus would not reveal: that everyone is right, as it turns out. you go to the place you always thought you would go, the place you kept lit in an alcove in your head. Some are being shot into a funnel of flashing colors into a zone of light, white as a January sun. Others are standing naked before a forbidding judge who sits with a golden ladder on one side, a coal chute on the other. Some have already joined the celestial choir and are singing as if they have been doing this forever, while the less inventive find themselves stuck in a big air conditioned room full of food and chorus girls. Some are approaching the apartment of the female God, a woman in her forties with short wiry hair and glasses hanging from her neck by a string. With one eye she regards the dead through a hole in her door. There are those who are squeezing into the bodies of animals—eagles and leopards—and one trying on the skin of a monkey like a tight suit, ready to begin another life in a more simple key, while others float off into some benign vagueness, little units of energy heading for the ultimate elsewhere. There are even a few classicists being led to an underworld by a mythological creature with a beard and hooves. He will bring them to the mouth of the furious cave guarded over by Edith Hamilton and her three-headed dog. The rest just lie on their backs in their coffins wishing they could return so they could learn Italian or see the pyramids, or play some golf in a light rain. They wish they could wake in the morning like you and stand at a window examining the winter trees, every branch traced with the ghost writing of snow.
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aemperatrix · 1 year
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Billy Collins
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havingapoemwithyou · 8 months
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poem by Billy Collins
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serdapoesia · 1 month
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Adoro o som da tua voz como um pequeno saxofone que me diz o que eu nunca poderia saber a menos que cavasse um buraco bem fundo até ao centro de mim mesmo. Billy Collins
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forgetfulness - billy collins
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apoemaday · 8 months
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The History Teacher
by Billy Collins Trying to protect his students' innocence he told them the Ice Age was really just the Chilly Age, a period of a million years when everyone had to wear sweaters. And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age, named after the long driveways of the time. The Spanish Inquisition was nothing more than an outbreak of questions such as "How far is it from here to Madrid?" "What do you call the matador's hat?" The War of the Roses took place in a garden, and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom on Japan. The children would leave his classroom for the playground to torment the weak and the smart, mussing up their hair and breaking their glasses, while he gathered up his notes and walked home past flower beds and white picket fences, wondering if they would believe that soldiers in the Boer War told long, rambling stories designed to make the enemy nod off.
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