Anything Can Happen, on the other hand, is not only about the atrociousness of the September 11 attack, it is also a premonition of the deadly retaliation that was bound to come.

The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.

My point is there's a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It's a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.

I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job

My teaching was animated by what I was reading and being excited by as a poet.

I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.

Don't be surprised if I demur, for, be advised my passport's green.