A love of language and a sense of gratitude
would be two ingredients
in the recipe for making a poet.
~ Billy Collins
What would your "recipe for making a poet" include?
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Billy Collins, former Poet Laureate of the United States, is one of America's best-known poets. His collections include The Trouble with Poetry: And Other Poems, Nine Horses: Poems, Questions About Angels: Poems, Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems, The Apple That Astonished Paris: Poems, and The Art of Drowning.
You will find a complete index of Collins' poems, books and recordings, and text and audio downloads, and biography here.
Collins' program Poetry 180: A Poem a Day for American High Schools is here; the 180 poems are listed and linked here.
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7 comments:
Courage.
Billy always gets things right. A sense of gratitude opens us up to whatever is around us and the love of language makes us want to capture it in words. Other than perhaps adding a sprinkle of the pepper of surprise to the mix, I wouldn't touch that recipe.
Thanks for the morning wake-up.
i don't know much about poetry
and i have never heard on billy collins.
i don't have a recipe for making a poet, but, i have a good one for apple pie. even though, i use the same ingredience each time i make a pie, each pie turns out differently. but, all have been comestible. maybe i can use my pie recipe and add a little less sugar, maybe that would make a poet.
I like ML's courage. I would also add a sense of wonder, and maybe a distrust of too many words. Curiosity too.
Good question!
Hi M. BTW did you get my response last week re our project?
While I was Jen van Winkle, doing so many other things, Billy Collins had his ascendancy. I like his work very much.
I believe that passion for one's subject triggers the lyric and informs the poem: that the impetus is powerful feeling. A love for the world, the universe, all things in it and an overwhelming compulsion to articulate what one sees.
This is all turning into a veritable feast. xj
to make a poet, take one perfectly ordinary person and steal them, bind them tightly in wind and water and old memories so that something is always scratching against their bones, but allow them always to cry out for release.
Very useful post. Collins has done a great deal to promote poetry. He understands teens,
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