You become a writer because you like to be alone in a room with your books.

Writing a poem is a more personal experience, I think, than writing prose. And perhaps reading a poem is a more personal experience than reading prose, though that's harder to say.

A huge portion of Trump voters are incredibly pleased with how he's performing. They see what they want to see.

Most of the poems I write go through forty versions and then stay in a file on my computer. I'm not very good at sending stuff out or feeling that something is ready to send out and I never have been. Part of the problem is that as soon as a poem is finished, it stops being all that interesting to me.

You become a writer because you like to be alone in a room with your books.

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.

With an age difference comes a great gap in cultural references, and so on. It's not all about race and gender. It interests me that, as you get older, your younger self becomes a stranger to you. A split occurs within yourself. But maybe we're all always strangers to ourselves.