The ground swell is what’s going to sink you as well as being what buoys you up. These are cliches also, of course, and I’m sometimes interested in how much one can get away with.

The center only exists in a metaphysical sense at the moment. There are no bricks and mortar involved now. And indeed, in a strange way, I’m rather glad that it’s not related to a specific...

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

The other side of it is that, despite all that, people reach out to poetry at the key moments in their lives.

It’s an opportunity to do something we’ve never quite managed before: to get our programs going in the same direction, under the same aegis, under one form of leadership. I think, in many ways, that...

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

The teachers I had myself, the best of them were quite extraordinary, and really did inspire one into reading, or indeed, writing.

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

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.

We simply have not kept in touch with poetry.

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

Last year I was a judge for a prize in England, the T.S. Eliot Prize, so I read everything that was published in England last year.

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

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

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 developed over the years – because we were having such...

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

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 political level.

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 whatsoever...

I do a lot of readings.

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

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

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 place.

I suppose for whatever reason I actively welcome being put down, something which perhaps goes back to my upbringing – that accusation of not being worthy which could be laid at one’s door.

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

I think it’s too simple to say that violence equals energy; people have said that along the way. Violence is debilitating as much as anything else.

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.

We have not solved the water-pollution problem.

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