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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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