Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.

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 credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.

As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.

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.

If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.

There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.