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Most poets' revisions are disastrous. They buckle and dent what was originally forged at a red-hot heat.

Michael Longley

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Michael Longley
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: July 27
Author
Poet
Writer
Belfast
Ireland
Forged
Originally
Poets
Revisions
Heat
Buckle
Hot
Dent
Red
Buckles
Poet
Disastrous
Revision

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I hardly ever look at my published books.
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I suppose that as you grow older some sense of an accumulating oeuvre is unavoidable.
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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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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.
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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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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'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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Every Monday morning I try to remember to say Thank you, Lord. I'm not at the Senior Staff Meeting.
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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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The gap between verse and poetry is enormous. Between good poetry and good prose the gap is much narrower
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