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.
Let whoever can win glory before death.
I spend almost every morning with mail.
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.
words...To lure the tribal shoals to epigram / And order.
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...
As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
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.
Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
Did you ever hear tell,'said Jimmy Farrell,'of the skulls they havein the city of Dublin?White skulls and black skullsand yellow skulls, and some with full teeth, and some haven't only but one,' and c...
I'm a firm believer in learning by heart.
What I've said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.