We simply have not kept in touch with poetry.

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

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

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

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..

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

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….

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….

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..

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….

Obviously one of the things that poets from Northern Ireland and beyond - had to try to make sense of was what was happening on a day-to-day politica….

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

The point of poetry is to be acutely discomforting, to prod and provoke, to poke us in the eye, to punch us in the nose, to knock us off our feet, to….

I do a lot of readings..

I'm sure 50 percent of television ads use rhyme.

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

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

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..

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