Since when," he asked,"Are the first line and last line of any poemWhere the poem begins and ends?
Since when, he asked,
If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.
Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.
The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It's a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.
I spend almost every morning with mail.
Let whoever can win glory before death.
Diodorus Siculus confessedHis gradual ease among the likes of this:Murdered, forgotten, nameless, terribleBeheaded girl, outstaring axeAnd beatification, outstaringWhat had begun to feel like reverenc...
words...To lure the tribal shoals to epigram / And order.
The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.
As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
What I've said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.
I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular.
In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.