Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world.

Best to say that once a poem is finished I trust it to make its way, and I trust readers will find their way to it and through it, if the thing has got itself rightly expressed.

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

Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland - it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.

The next move is always the test.

Harvard meant a lot in my writing life from the beginning, even though I didnt actually do much composition on the spot.

Anyone with gumption and a sharp mind will take the measure of two things: what's said and what's done.