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

The ground swell is what’s going to sink you as well as being what buoys you up. These are clichés also, of course, and I’m sometimes interested in how much one can get away with.

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.

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.

It seems to me the structure of the Quartets is too imposed.

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

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