The Aim Of Poetry And

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.

The Gift Of Writing Is To Be Self-forgetful... To Get A Surge Of Inner Life Or Inner Supply Or Unexpected Sense Of Empowerment, To Be Afloat, To Be Out Of Yourself.

In Off The Moors, Down Through The Mist Beams, God-cursed Grendel Came Greedily Loping.

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 Completely Solitary Self: That's Where Poetry Comes From, And It Gets Isolated By Crisis, And Those Crises Are Often Very Intimate Also.