I would insist that poetry is a normal human activity and its proper concern all the things that happen to people.
There's always a danger of writers believing their own publicity. We live in a world of puff and solicited blurb, a world of favours and backscratching.
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 knowledge. At some stage a form or, rather, a shape mysteriously emerges.
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 poetry happens at a level above or below intelligence. It doesn't come into being at a purely rational level.
Every Monday morning I try to remember to say "Thank you, Lord. I'm not at the Senior Staff Meeting."
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.
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 sharpened and we register much more than usual - a striking face or hair-do, the wind's behaviour, a bird singing.
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 it's bad for your poetry to take steroids.
I suppose that as you grow older some sense of an accumulating oeuvre is unavoidable.
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 tinker - I'm more likely to destroy.
In America, where you'd have thought the country's so huge it couldn't happen quite so cosily, everyone's giving his imprimatur to everyone else. You line up three or four well-known poets and a couple of eminent academics on the dustjacket, and the rest of academe follow like sheep. That's death really, if you take pleasure in it. Mind you, the occasional puff's hard to resist, but you shouldn't inhale.
The gap between verse and poetry is enormous. Between good poetry and good prose the gap is much narrower
I think a philistine environment should be bracing for young artists. You have to make your own enjoyment, you've got to make your own art.
A good poem is not completely a poem until it has received a critical response that grows out of the poem in an almost biological way.
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 re-read the new poems in my folder in the hope that this might happen.
