The whole point of writing poetry or fiction is that you get to agonize over whatever it is you want to say, and you finally say it, and you get it as perfect as you can make it. Then you're forced to babble freestyle.

Poetry is a way of being alone without feeling alone. It allows you to experience another mind, I suppose. And it does that more fully than other art forms, I think. It doesn't simply describe an experience, or a feeling, or a moment: it evokes it through, say, rhythm or tone or diction or metaphor. It creates a mood. A poem communicates before it is understood; it's not a fully paraphrasable form, which distinguishes it from other forms of writing.

When you're rereading or editing your book and you start to expect that this work is going to be reviewed, and you can sort of tell which line is going to show up in reviews.

There used to be one writer rather than a team of writers. It's the old line about a camel being a horse designed by committee.

I think all writing is an attempt to complicate and subvert the dominant narrative. Writing personalizes statistics. It puts a face and a name on a number. I suppose in that sense it's always political.

I don't think there's any law where you have to read a poem and immediately understand it.

I think New York is working its way into my poems. It takes a while for a place to filter its way onto the page, but I've been reading more and more American poetry and I certainly feel it as quite a freeing force. Coming from the formally ordered tradition of poetry in Ireland, I find the expansiveness of American literature freeing in some sense.