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

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

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.

I do a lot of readings.

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

I'm sure 50 percent of television ads use rhyme

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 of where it's going to end up