Taking the question in general, I should say, in the case of many poets, that the most important thing for them to do ... is to write as little as possible
That was one of things that surprised me so much when I was writing the poems. The contrasts between the haves and have-nots is so complicated. It's financial of course, but it's also the lifestyle choices. The more money people have the further away from each other they often want to be. So while I loved not being hungry and having new gear, etc. I missed the sounds of my neighbors and the kind of generosity people who are struggling together often show.
That is the true genius of America, a faith in the simple dreams of its people, the insistence on small miracles. That we can say what we think, write what we think, without hearing a sudden knock on the door.
Write about this man who, drop by drop, squeezes the slave's blood out of himself until he wakes one day to find the blood of a real human being--not a slave's--coursing through his veins.
When you write an article about anything, trolls use the comments to attack. They feel frustrated - but haters are losers. It's not good to feed this aspect. It's more intelligent to be constructive.
It is sublime to think and say of another, I need never meet, or speak, or write to him: we need not reinforce ourselves, or send tokens of remembrance; I rely on him as on myself: if he did thus and thus, I know it was right.
Why does one write these books after all? The drudgery, the misery, the grind, are forgotten everytime; and one launches another, and it seems sheer joy and buoyancy.
A pioneer in this genre [ writing about the refugee crisis] : the book A Seventh Man, by the great John Berger, decades ago evoked the lives of migrant workers in Europe.
Don't loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don't get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it.
I only can write a book every two years, you know. And I write very fast, but I'm not always writing every day. I needed a contact with different things, like nature, for example. I cannot be in front of a computer trying to tell a story.
My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis.