". . .the truth is that influence enters us from all sides. It is the
chlorine in the flood of experience that spills continuously into the
conscious mind. A short-story writer may have been influenced by
18th-century Dutch painting as much as anything else — or by his
mother’s cooking. A painter may have been marked by her love of album
covers or the childhood love of her cousin. And with that said, I am
free to confess that my own poetry would have not developed in the
direction it did, for better or worse, were it not for the spell that
was cast over me as a boy by Warner Bros. cartoons. The very first time
I heard the pulse-quickening blast of the zany theme music by Carl
Stalling — enough to bring any American boy to attention — and saw
the colorful bull’s-eye emblazoned on the big screen, I was hooked."
— For more from Billy Collins’s Wall Street Journal piece "Inspired by a Bunny Wabbit" (June 28, 2008), click here.
". . . all the characters bring out various sides to us. Daffy Duck is sort of
the manic, blabbering, fearless one. Bugs Bunny is the clever, ironic,
sardonic, wry, foxy, outwitting one. And Porky’s a little pathetic.
He’s the only one who’s actually married–if that’s the state that
these characters are in. He’s the only one with a life partner, let’s
put it that way: Petunia, who tends to be a nag. Strangely, there’s
only one human in this whole thing, which is Elmer Fudd."
— Click here for more of Billy Collins’s interview with Marc Sanchez, "Cartoons and Poetry" (from Weekend America, September 20, 2008).