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

I don't miss teaching. I'm learning to take my time for myself.

I drink to keep body and soul apart.

Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world.

My point is there's a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It's a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.

But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.

The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. Take off from here.