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.

I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

Anything Can Happen is also, incidentally, a poem that arose from teaching. I'd talked about the Horace Ode (I, 34) [on which the poem is based] in a lecture I gave at Harvard in the fall of 2000 entitled Bright Boltsand remembered it after the Twin Towers attack.

Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.

I am not a playwright. A playwright would take "Antigone" and hit it a few clouts and knock it out of shape and restructure it. My versioning was strictly verbal.

The end of art is peace.

Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.