In A Journey with Two Maps, I felt that your prose was so subtle and so deep that I had to mine it for riches. Do you ever feel like this kind of subtle style gets lost in this day of shock value and short attention spans?

If an argument is carefully constructed and stated as truthfully as possible, it won’t get lost. It will wait for a certain kind of reader. And that reader will find it. A Journey with Two Maps has a fairly modest purpose. I’m just setting out the arguments and critiques I found useful and thought about as a working poet. That doesn’t have too much to do with shock value or short attention spans. If a reader has a short attention span, they’re not too likely to turn to this sort of book anyway.

In the chapter on Adrienne Rich, you talk about how poems that achieve are deeply rooted in a human life. In your view, what’s the relationship between the political and the personal? Are they mutually exclusive or can they be entwined? And do you think we in America have a bias for or against the personal poem?

I’m not sure the idea of the “personal” poem is one I recognize. I think “public” and “private” may be more useful terms. The seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were full of public poems — set pieces, from Marvell’s “An Horation Ode on Cromwell” to Tennyson’s hypnotic piece “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” But poets in this century and the last have felt increasingly free to work from a private perspective. It became clear that the private poem of insistence and passion was not a substitution for the political poem but a rich extension of it. That’s a shift from the nineteenth century, when the public poem — like, again, Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” — was thought the only suitable way of addressing a public situation. Since then we’ve seen how the private perspective lifts and illuminates the public one. It’s this that has proved the political poem need not necessarily be a public one. That was a real freedom for poets and poetry in the twentieth century. Whether it’s Allen Ginsberg in “A Supermarket in California” or Adrienne Rich in “From An Old House in America,” a private voice can be heard in poems like these to be also a deeply political one. And no, I don’t think there was any bias about this. These were just welcomed as fine and essential poems.

After living in London and then New York, beginning at the age five, it sounds like your return to Ireland as a teenager left you feeling displaced. Did that influence your poetry or your desire to be a poet?

I certainly felt like an outsider when I returned to Ireland. I was fourteen. I just had a simple sense of having missed so much, and not being able to read the codes and signals of my own country. So much of what we know of a nation, so much of what marks us as insiders, as denizens of a place, comes from the idioms and experiences of childhood. I didn’t have that. I felt as if a portion of my sense of Irishness was missing. I had no Irish childhood memories. I couldn’t share my first sight of the sea, or my term at an Irish-speaking college, or my knowledge of my cousins. At first, that was disorienting. As time went on I began to feel it might not be such a bad thing. In a strange way it even provided me with a perspective as a writer. A way of looking at things from the margins I might have missed otherwise.