Sherry Chandler

but a poet who seems to work like I do. From the Arkansas Democrat Gazette

FAYETTEVILLE — Billy Collins often looked at the images of America’s greatest poets in his Washington D. C. office and felt out of place, he said Tuesday at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.

Collins, a self-described “middle-class” poet, served two terms as the United States’ poet laureate, a position appointed annually by the librarian of Congress. The framed photographs of his predecessors, including Robert Penn Warren, William Carlos Williams and Gwendolyn Brooks, hang on a wall in the laureate’s Library of Congress office, he said.

“When I stood at my laureate desk,” Collins said, “I could see this wall of laureates and they seemed to be looking at me, particularly Richard Wilbur, and they were saying, ‘What the hell are you doing here ?’

…

Revision is “highly overrated,” he said.

“Revision should be taking out, not adding,” he said. “Revisions that add things are usually disastrous, because it looks like something put together with duct tape.”

Collins advised that “if a poem’s not going well, stop writing it.” “ Go cook some good soup or something, ” he said. He doesn’t set aside time during the day to write, Collins said. “I have no work habits whatsoever,” he said. “I write when it comes to me. I have no time I spend at a desk. I’m not a good role model, but that’s the way it goes, I guess.”

I found the link at Stick Poet Super Hero. He got it from Poetry Hut Blog.

107. Concepts of past and future precede an ability to conceive of the sentence.

108. Subjects hypnotized to forget the past and future wrote words at random intervals about the page.

(Remembering always: 99. Those who would excerpt or edit miss the point.)

— from Ron Silliman’s The Chinese Notebook