Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
~ Seamus Heaney
A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
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.
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.
In the United States, in poetry workshops, it's now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
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.
Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
