Billy Collins: I mean writing poetry, or painting, or dancing, or playing the trumpet, all of these activities that we consider art – for lack of a better name – are really, I think, just extensions of natural childhood activities, childhood desires that are enacted. I mean as children we are painters, dancers. Just give a kid a flute and he’ll start playing it. And writers. I mean all children love rhyme. I think poets/artists are just people who somehow didn’t allow that natural ability in childhood to be killed off by bad teaching, the self-consciousness of adolescence. A lot goes down the drain because of that.

July 4, 2007