I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

Im a firm believer in learning by heart.

A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.

I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.

Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.

My point is there's a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It's a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.

The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. Take off from here.