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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.

Michael Longley

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Michael Longley
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: July 27
Author
Poet
Writer
Belfast
Ireland
Exploration
Proof
Latin
Shapes
Versions
Level
Greek
Levels
Engaged
Form
Originals
Explorations
Original
Endorsement
Endorsements
Shape

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Of course, when a poem is being born, the reasoning part of the brain throbs away at full throttle, but all the other areas are overlapping and interacting as well, the emotional, intuitive, animal areas.
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I suppose that as you grow older some sense of an accumulating oeuvre is unavoidable.
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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.
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I do feel that a poem needs not just space, but, ideally, space around that space - space for meditation, reverie, subliminal link-ups. I sense that poetry happens at a level above or below intelligence. It doesn't come into being at a purely rational level.
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I'm not the kind of poet who arranges treasure-hunts to please the academics and keep them busy. Poetry should be surprising in deeper ways.
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The job has left me with a healthy disregard for what you might call Public Life. I have no desire now to go to receptions, to be seen at gatherings of the great and the good, to stand and be bored to death by men in grey suits.
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I would insist that poetry is a normal human activity and its proper concern all the things that happen to people.
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Every Monday morning I try to remember to say Thank you, Lord. I'm not at the Senior Staff Meeting.
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The gap between verse and poetry is enormous. Between good poetry and good prose the gap is much narrower
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Most poets' revisions are disastrous. They buckle and dent what was originally forged at a red-hot heat.
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I hardly ever look at my published books.
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