OK, so if your poems start that way and someone like James Tate has a more bombastic beginning, why do you think that is? Is that a poet's personality shaping their body of work?
That is a very good question. If you look at the beginnings of poets' poems, every poet is in the habit of making a different set of demands on the reader. I love James Tate's work. His more recent work is a strangely folksy, storytelling work where it's very easy to follow in the beginning because he seems to be telling a story around the cracker-barrel. But it takes place in a town that is extremely eccentric. I suppose it's just a matter of how you address the reader. Do you jump in? Do you start in the middle of things? Or, like me, do you try to back the poem up and talk about how the poem came into being?
Gene Myers Interviews Billy Collins