Quote

I find that my reading, particularly nonfiction, can inspire a poem as well as anything else.

Fiction and poetry are my first loves, but the really beautiful lyrical essay can do so much that other forms cannot.

Translated poetry filled the no-man's-land between my own work and other writers', and I found this fascinating to explore.

I was really exposed to great old-time literature - the classics, the poetic realists like Strindberg and Ibsen and all those guys. I was really inspired by all those guys. That's when writing became a primary focus.

So much inspires me. People living their lives with courage, beauty of all kinds, nature in all its aspects, people I love and people I hardly know, and, of course, other poets.

I have always loved reading, so was interested in the literary world, and took many literary portraits.

I love the 19th-century idea of the flaneur, the poet wandering through the streets.

Literature at its fullest takes human nature as its theme. That's the kind of writing that interests me.

Of all the species of literary composition, perhaps biography is the most delightful. The attention concentrated on one individual gives a unity to the materials of which it is composed, which is wanting in general history.

I read a lot of nineteenth-century French poetry. And Irish poetry from the ninth century on.