The end of art is peace.
— Seamus Heaney
Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
I don't think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.
Every time you read a poem aloud to yourself in the presence of others, you are reading it into yourself and them. Voice helps to carry words farther and deeper than the eye.
Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland - it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.
I don't do as many readings as I used to. There was a time when I was on the road a lot more, at home in Ireland, in Britain, in Canada and the States, a time when I had more stamina and appetite for it.
It is very true to say that work done by writers is quite often an attempt to give solid expression to that which is bothering them... They feel they have got it right if they express the stress.
Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
I spend almost every morning with mail.
The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.
If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
If you go into an underground train in London - probably anywhere, but chiefly in London - there's that sense of almost entering a ghostly dimension. People are very still and quiet; they don't exchange many pleasantries.
In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
I think the first little jolt I got was reading Gerard Manley Hopkins - I liked other poems... but Hopkins was kind of electric for me - he changed the rules with speech, and the whole intensity of the language was there and so on.
I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension. But then there's the reality: there's no Heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised, and no personal God.
I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.
I would say that something important for me and for my generation in Northern Ireland was the 1947 Education Act, which allowed students who won scholarships to go on to secondary schools and thence to university.
Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
I believe we are put here to improve civilisation.
Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
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.
Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.
The day I entered St Columb's College, my parents bought me a Conway Stewart pen. It was a special afternoon, of course. We were going to be parting that evening; they were aware of it, I was aware of it, nothing much was said about it.
Tom Sleigh's poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution.
The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
I've been in the habit of helping people.
I've said it before about the Nobel Prize: it's like being struck by a more or less benign avalanche. It was unexpected, unlooked for, and extraordinary.
I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
To encounter 'Beowulf' is like taking a sledgehammer to a quarry face. You must bang in there.
I feel myself part of something. Not only being part of a community but part of an actual moment and a movement of Irish writing and art. That sense of being part of the whole thing is the deepest joy.
In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work - the hay in the summertime, for example.
Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
The group of writers I had grown up with in the '60s - Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, James Simmons, John Hewitt, Paul Muldoon - formed a very necessary and self-sustaining group.
The problem as you get older... is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to surprise yourself. There's no way of arranging the surprise, so it is tricky.
I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
There's never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
You yourself don't have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.
I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
I think that water is immediately interesting. It's just, as an element, it is full of life. It is associated with origin; it is bright - it reflects you.
Your temperament is what you write with, but it's also how you deal with the world.
We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
My experience is that prose usually equals duty - last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.
I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.
In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.
As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that's what publication does.
One of the best descriptions of the type of writer I am was given by Tom Paulin, who described himself as a 'binge' writer - like a binge drinker. I go on binges.
One doesn't want one's identity coerced.
