The poet is like the earth’s shadow. The sun moves, and the poet writes something down.
Category Archive: 1949
I’m not naturally manipulative.
The notion that female initiative is useless because men know what they want is particularly odd – most people don’t even know what they want for dinner.
PETA’s campaign should be included in school curricula. If we can open children’s hearts and minds to animals’ needs, teach them to treat a dog or a chicken as if they feel fear and love and pain – as they do – then they will grow up to understand that we are all worthy of respect.
Sunday is a likely day to write a poem. Because poetry is a piece of language flying around: you’ll find notebooks, something on your phone. It’s about finding them and getting them off that crumpled piece of paper and onto my computer.
Dogs are a companion species. It’s about time – you have an animal for about 15, 16 years, a generation. That time holds so much. You might have had five or six relationships with human beings but one dog.
I do most of the cooking. I’m kind of domestic, untidily so.
Older men get lovable, and older women get monstrous.
Again and again, I find something eerie in many Irish occasions – the unrelenting whiteness, the emotional tribal attachments, the violent prejudices lurking beneath apparently pleasant social surfaces, the cosy smugness of belonging.
I’ve had a lifelong waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop feeling when something good happens.