I began to write in an Ireland where the word ‘woman’ and the word ‘poet’ seemed to be in some sort of magnetic opposition to each other.
let us not forget that going right back in our evolutionary DNA, poetry was the medium of utterance, ecstasy, a lullaby, an incantation, so before you had things written down, there was poetry. But somewhere along the line, particularly in the western tradition, the oral was cut off from the written, and then poetry began to be perceived as something abstract and airy fairy and not about the concrete fact. But let us face it: do we want to dwell in a world of concrete facts?
Well, I wrote a book about that called Gig: The Life and Times of a Rock-Star Fantasist where I test out the idea that I only became a poet because I failed in that world.
A lot of oral poetry is keyed into our heartbeat. The words you hear at your mother's lap. The utterance of words in the right order can excite, be thought-provoking.
Only thing I had to treasure was poetry and the knowledge that I was going to be a poet.
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.
I started writing poems to feel like I belonged.
Poetry needs a background in which emotional, as well as material values are given their due weight.
Appreciation of poetry, one out of 10 or whatever it might be, is quite alien to what a poet feels about poetry.