When I'm assembling a book I concentrate as though I were writing a poem. A truly imagined arrangement will indicate gaps and generate new poems. I r…

- Michael Longley

I'm not the kind of poet who arranges treasure-hunts to please the academics and keep them busy. Poetry should be surprising in deeper ways.

- Michael Longley

Weddings and funerals have so much in common (except that in Ireland funerals are more fun - better food, better drink): at both, our senses are shar…

- Michael Longley

I don't know where the shape of a poem comes from. I certainly don't impose it. I write out of a jumble of emotions and vague notions and scraps of k…

- Michael Longley

I work hard to make the poems as good as they can be, and if they're not good enough I scrap them. I find it difficult after a gap of a few years to …

- Michael Longley

I do feel that a poem needs not just space, but, ideally, space around that space - space for meditation, reverie, subliminal link-ups. I sense that …

- Michael Longley

I suppose that as you grow older some sense of an accumulating oeuvre is unavoidable.

- Michael Longley

Every Monday morning I try to remember to say "Thank you, Lord. I'm not at the Senior Staff Meeting."

- Michael Longley

I'm not against ambition and reach, but if you can say it in four lines, why waste your time saying it in more? Challenge the world by all means, but…

- Michael Longley