To begin with, I wanted that truth to life to possess a concrete reliability, and rejoiced most when the poem seemed most direct, an upfront representation of the world it stood in for or stood up for or stood its ground against.

The poems I did write there [in Harvard] include Alphabets the 1984 Phi Beta Kappa poem and A Sofa in the Forties. And, of course, the John Harvard poem for the 350th anniversary Villanelle for an Anniversary.

A writer is not different from a reader, in that the common ragbag of orthodoxies and assumptions is what a poet has to work with as well.

There is not built-in meaning to anything, we are free to add any meaning we choose to give it.

Write whatever you like!

Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for.

The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.