News at Eleven: But isn't it an obvious question--

who writes poetry except poets? Is one not the creation of the other? As Yeats wrote: "How can we know the dancer from the dance?"

"I didn't think of anything beyond poems," [Patrick] Crotty answers opaquely. "Having identified the different kinds of poetry, I then went for what seemed to me to be the most verbally alert, the most linguistically energetic samples." He sighs. "Needless to say, this is the section that I agonised most about and lost most sleep about, because people's sense of identity is tied up with their work."

from Irish Times: The cut and thrust of Irish poetry

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