Michael Longley Famous Quotes
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I think a philistine environment should be bracing for young artists. You have to make your own enjoyment, you've got to make your own art.
When I'm assembling a book I concentrate as though I were writing a poem. A truly imagined arrangement will indicate gaps and generate new poems. I re-read the new poems in my folder in the hope that this might happen.
In America, where you'd have thought the country's so huge it couldn't happen quite so cosily, everyone's giving his imprimatur to everyone else. You line up three or four well-known poets and a couple of eminent academics on the dustjacket, and the rest of academe follow like sheep. That's death really, if you take pleasure in it. Mind you, the occasional puff's hard to resist, but you shouldn't inhale.
I don't know where the shape of a poem comes from. I certainly don't impose it. I write out of a jumble of emotions and vague notions and scraps of knowledge. At some stage a form or, rather, a shape mysteriously emerges.
I suppose that as you grow older some sense of an accumulating oeuvre is unavoidable.
A good poem is not completely a poem until it has received a critical response that grows out of the poem in an almost biological way.
Weddings and funerals have so much in common (except that in Ireland funerals are more fun - better food, better drink): at both, our senses are sharpened and we register much more than usual - a striking face or hair-do, the wind's behaviour, a bird singing.
I'm not against ambition and reach, but if you can say it in four lines, why waste your time saying it in more? Challenge the world by all means, but it's bad for your poetry to take steroids.
Every Monday morning I try to remember to say "Thank you, Lord. I'm not at the Senior Staff Meeting."
Most poets' revisions are disastrous. They buckle and dent what was originally forged at a red-hot heat.
I hardly ever look at my published books.
For me the form, the stanzaic shape, is an endorsement, proof that I'm engaged with the Latin or Greek at an original level, that my versions are explorations.
The gap between verse and poetry is enormous. Between good poetry and good prose the gap is much narrower
