Language is remarkable, except under the extreme constraints of mathematics and logic, it never can talk only about what it's supposed to talk about but is always spreading around.

When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.

[T]eaching has been for me an education (Lord knows what it has been for my students).

History is where tensions were.

Mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably. In my poem Poetics, it's as close as I come to telling how I do it.

The spirit world doesn't admit to communicating with me, so it's fairly even.

Writing is like the relationship with your bowels. First you can, then you can't. Finally, you must. Only then should you reach for the paper.