What is different about Irish poetry from American poetry?
Not in essence. The great Irish poet of the 20th century, W.B. Yeats, was very much influenced by Walt Whitman’s attempts to create a national literature. Contemporary Irish poets are interested in Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, C.K. Williams. The main differences that might have existed – in vocabulary, say – are less and less significant as Ireland becomes yet another annex of the US. What’s the ideal length for a poem, if there can be said to be an ideal? I noticed that many of your poems are fairly short, as well as many New Yorker poems, and I was wondering if this expressed a stylistic preference. The ideal length is the length of a piece of string, how long it has to be. And Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” is no better or worse than Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” though they’re poems of thousands of lines and two lines respectively. Who is this wet suit-wearing Carlotta whose name is an anagram for “oral tact”? She’s a complete fiction, though based on aspects of several women I’
