BILLY COLLINS: We love, you know, children love the ingredients of poetry. And then they go into this tunnel that we call adolescence, and when they come out of it, they hate poetry.
KEN SAGAL: Well, when I was an adolescent, and I'm sure this is true of - let's see, this is NPR - 98 percent of our audience, I wrote very sad, melancholy, self-indulgent poetry.
COLLINS: I did, too.
SAGAL: Right, well I wanted to ask, I mean, was your - since you are now a successful and award-winning poet - do you feel that your self-indulgent, adolescent poetry was better than average?
COLLINS: Well, we all have - we're all born with 200 bad poems in us.
(LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: Really?
COLLINS: This is statistically proven. And so - and middle school and high school is a good time to get rid of those. And - but I wrote this - I believe, because this is what I was reading, I believed that poetry was two things. It was hard to understand, but one thing you could understand is the poet was miserable.
SAGAL: Yes.
COLLINS: So I pretended to be miserable, and it's very easy to write poems that are hard to understand. Finally, I read poets who were not so miserable, in fact humorous. And they gave me permission to release what I was repressing, which was this sense of humor I inherited from my father.
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