Arts & Entertainment, Writing
Writing Process
Lesson time 09:09 min
Billy shares his personal notebooks and gives rare insight into the process of writing his poem “Grand Central.”
Students give MasterClass an average rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars
Topics include: Make a Mess · Writing “Grand Central”
Teaches Reading and Writing Poetry
In his first-ever online class, former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins teaches you how to find joy, humor, and humanity in reading and writing poetry.
Get Up To 50% OffPreview
[MUSIC PLAYING] - So my usual process, if you will, is that I start by writing in a notebook with a pencil or a pen. And I make a mess. I try to write a good line and then another good line and another good line. But I'm not-- no one's a good line machine. So often, there will be a lot of cross outs. And the reason I write in the journal is to make a mess, to cross out this stanza, change a word. And then I can kind of see the development of the poem. And I might want to go back and change my mind. If I wrote it on a computer, we delete all the mistakes. And you always have a clean copy which I think is deceptive, because it does not express the randomness and that kind of chaos of constantly changing and trying to improve self-correcting. And then at the very last minute, after I write multiple drafts-- sometimes it's one, really one, or two, or three, or four, it depends on how long the poem is and how quickly it came to me-- then I will put it up on the computer screen in word processor. And what I learn there is how the poem is actually going to look on the page. Now, when I'm writing it, I'm trying to write what they call isometric lines. That is, lines of poetry that are about the same length. I don't want a two word line, then a 10 word line. I want the poem to look like-- you know, they look like flags. The left side is justified. And the right side is raggedy. So like a kind of flag that's a little weather beaten. But. I'll know exactly, then, when I type it up how the poem is actually going to look. And you know poems have a look. They have a look on the page. And it's the first thing we see when we're introduced to a poem. We turn the page in a magazine. And there is a poem. We can see it's a skinny poem or it's a fat poem. Or it looks disorganized or it looks very tight and quatrained. It's dressed for some occasion or not so well dressed. And I make adjustments to give it a better shape to make it look a little more shapely. If I have a line that's just way too long, I'll just try to make it two lines maybe. But I'm really organizing the statue of the poem on the computer. That's a little thing on a page. And you can carry it over to the computer and see how it looks again. There's a lot of staring involved at the poem. [MUSIC PLAYING] Well, this is a typical notebook that I have a Post-It that says full. So it's not usable anymore. All the pages are covered. Well, all sorts of stuff comes into this. I mean, I have some notes about teaching poetry. There are poems that are begun and abandoned. And then here's a quote from a Sam Cook song. "Here's a man in evening clothes, how he got here I don't know." A poem called the "Card Players" based on a Cezanne painting. There are doodles. I like to draw dogs and landscapes and little things. And then there's a journal of a trip to Canada we took last summer to visit my mother's hometown in Ontario. Some of the poems are false starts. There's a poem ab...
About the Instructor
Known for his wit and wisdom, former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins is one of America’s most beloved contemporary poets. In his MasterClass, Billy teaches you to appreciate the emotional pull of poetry. Learn his approach to exploring subjects, incorporating humor, and finding your voice. Discover the profound in the everyday, and let poetry lead you to the unexpected.
Featured MasterClass Instructor
Billy Collins
In his first-ever online class, former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins teaches you how to find joy, humor, and humanity in reading and writing poetry.
Explore the Class