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 a good time

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

If the poem has no obvious destination, there's a chance that we'll be all setting off on an interesting ride.

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.

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

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 do a lot of readings.