The best poems come from the world, go through the poet, and go back in to the world.
One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.
I don't shape trends, I'd say. I merely reflect them. I think the emphasis is on 'them.' I like variety in poetry. I love how it comes in so many guises. As rock lyric, as rap, as note on a fridge.
Words want to find chimes with each other, things want to connect.
Poetry is as vital as ever. The teaching of poetry reading, however, is sluggish and, often, slovenly. It needs to be expanded in the school curriculum and be more a feature of society at large. The newspapers should all be carrying a daily poem. It should be as natural as reading a novel.
I live in New Jersey now, which always gets a bad rap here and there, but I must say, I enjoy living here too.
Living at that pitch, on that edge, is something which many poets engage in to some extent.
I love adventure stories.
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.
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.
I do believe that we've a responsibility to try to acknowledge the range, both geographic and graphic, of what's happening in poetry in English. I'm interested in poems that are first-rate. After that, I'm not too concerned if they come from Queens or Queensland.
Believe it or not, one of the first poets I was aware of was Yeats. I recited 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' at a verse speaking competition when I was eight or nine.
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 was born in Northern Ireland in 1951. I lived most of my life there until 1986 or 1987.
Teaching regularly has made me an even more adept reader, I think. The kind of teaching I do is more like editing than anything else. The kind of editing book editors used to do before lunch. The kind of editing I used to do as a radio documentary maker.
I was reared on American TV and films. There was a huge sense of occasion about going to the cinema in Moy in the late 1950s and early '60s, and I absolutely loved those Hollywood sword-and-sandal movies like Ben-Hur and the dime-a-dozen cowboy-and-Indian films, as we then referred to them.
For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry.
Frost isn't exactly despised but not enough people have worked out what a brilliant poet he was.
I believe that these devices like repetition and rhyme are not artificial, that they're not imposed, somehow, on the language.
