Best to say that once a poem is finished I trust it to make its way, and I trust readers will find their way to it and through it, if the thing has got itself rightly expressed.

The whole relationship between a writer's spiritual/emotional condition and the kind of wordstuff and form-making that's going on in his work is an interesting one. When I was an undergraduate, there was a glib notion around that there was no reason to suppose a bad man could be a good writer.

One of the very first poems I wrote was Docker That fist would drop a hammer on a Catholic and one of the sturdiest was Requiem for the Croppies, written 50 years after 1916 [the year of the Easter Rising]. Being responsible and what it means, what it demands, have indeed preoccupied me maybe too much. But this is it, this is the thing, this is what you're up against.

Hope for a great sea-change timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive.

The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful...

When I was teaching, I gave a lot of my mind and anxiety to it. There was always something clenched and anxious in me until the classes were over.

Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun. ~from the poem "Digging