The external reality and inner dynamic of happenings in Northern Ireland between 1968 and 1974 were symptomatic of change, violent change admittedly, but change nevertheless, and for the minority living there, change had been long overdue.

If self is a location, so is love: Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points, Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance, Here and there and now and then, a stance.

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

The appointment [in Harvard] gave me economic safety, writerly support, and intellectual self-respectplus eight months to myself every year.

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

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

I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.