The other side of it is that, despite all that, people reach out to poetry at the key moments in their lives.
From Paul Muldoon
We simply have not kept in touch with poetry.
What I try to do is to go into a poem - and one writes them, of course, poem by poem - to go into each poem, first of all without having any sense whatsoever of where it's going to end up.
Frost isn't exactly despised but not enough people have worked out what a brilliant poet he was.
I do a lot of readings.
I live in New Jersey now, which always gets a bad rap here and there, but I must say, I enjoy living here too.
I was born in Northern Ireland in 1951. I lived most of my life there until 1986 or 1987.
It seems to me the structure of the Quartets is too imposed.
Obviously one of the things that poets from Northern Ireland and beyond - had to try to make sense of was what was happening on a day-to-day political level.
Of course, you can't legislate for how people are going to read.
8 perspectives
4 perspectives
3 perspectives
1 perspectives