Michael Longley Quotes

#1. 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.

Michael Longley

#2. The gap between verse and poetry is enormous. Between good poetry and good prose the gap is much narrower

Michael Longley

#3. There's always a danger of writers believing their own publicity. We live in a world of puff and solicited blurb, a world of favours and backscratching.

Michael Longley

#4. Every Monday morning I try to remember to say "Thank you, Lord. I'm not at the Senior Staff Meeting."

Michael Longley

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

Michael Longley

#6. 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.

Michael Longley

#7. 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.

Michael Longley

#8. 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.

Michael Longley

#9. 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.

Michael Longley

#10. 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

#11. I hardly ever look at my published books.

Michael Longley

#12. 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.

Michael Longley

#13. I work hard to make the poems as good as they can be, and if they're not good enough I scrap them. I find it difficult after a gap of a few years to tinker - I'm more likely to destroy.

Michael Longley

#14. I was the first Arts Council official in the archipelago to do something for what you might call indigenous music.

Michael Longley

#15. 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.

Michael Longley

#16. I suppose that as you grow older some sense of an accumulating oeuvre is unavoidable.

Michael Longley

#17. 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.

Michael Longley

#18. 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.

Michael Longley

#19. 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.

Michael Longley

#20. I would insist that poetry is a normal human activity and its proper concern all the things that happen to people.

Michael Longley