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.

My teaching was animated by what I was reading and being excited by as a poet.

At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.

I suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.

I drink to keep body and soul apart.

Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.

In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.