[One of my students said], 'Poetry is harder than writing,' which I found both erroneous and profound.

Collins relays a student’s remark—“Poetry is harder than writing”—and calls it “erroneous and profound” to capture a paradox at the heart of his teaching. It is “erroneous” because poetry is itself a form of writing; the student’s phrasing mistakenly separates poetry from the broader act of composition. Yet it is “profound” because it points to the distinctive pressures poetry places on the writer: compression, heightened attention to sound and rhythm, and the demand that every word carry unusual weight. The comment also reflects Collins’s characteristic humor and generosity toward beginners, treating a clumsy statement as an opening into a serious insight about craft.