Form is a straitjacket in the way that a straitjacket was a straitjacket for Houdini.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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