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.

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

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

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.

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

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