Words want to find chimes with each other, things want to connect..

On the other hand, at some level the mass of unresolved issues in Northern Ireland does influence the fact that there are so many good writers in the….

Frost isn’t exactly despised but not enough people have worked out what a brilliant poet he was..

I live in New Jersey now, which always gets a bad rap here and there, but I must say, I enjoy living here too.

We simply have not kept in touch with poetry.

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way..

I was born in Northern Ireland in 1951. I lived most of my life there until 1986 or 1987.

For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry.

Confusion is what we're living with - not being able to make sense of what's happening to us from day to day. Whereas making sense is what we're aimi….

I certainly am interested in accessibility, clarity, and immediacy..

It's not as if I'm trying to write crossword puzzles to which one might find an answer at the back of the book or anything like that..

Form is a straitjacket in the way that a straitjacket was a straitjacket for Houdini..

If the poem has no obvious destination, there's a chance that we'll be all setting off on an interesting ride..

What I try to do is to go into a poem - and one writes them, of course, poem by poem - to go into each poem, first of all without having any sense wh….

That's one of the great things about poetry; one realises that one does one's little turn - that you're just part of the great crop, as it were..

The ground swell is what’s going to sink you as well as being what buoys you up. These are clichés also, of course, and I’m sometimes interested in h….

Living at that pitch, on that edge, is something which many poets engage in to some extent..

Your average pop song or film is a very sophisticated item, with very sophisticated ways of listening and viewing that we have not really consciously….

Of course, you can't legislate for how people are going to read..

It seems to me the structure of the Quartets is too imposed..

I believe that these devices like repetition and rhyme are not artificial, that they're not imposed, somehow, on the language..