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.

The next move is always the test.

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

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

Don't be surprised if I demur, for, be advised my passport's green.

I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.

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