Although there are some poets from other countries that become well-known in America, there are still not that many. Why do you think Americans embraced you and your poetry? What, if anything, does your acceptance here have to do with your subject matter?

I’ve read and admired American poetry from the beginning. I went to school for three years in the U.S. when I was eleven, and that’s where I first heard Whitman and Dickinson and first heard American voices saying that poetry out loud. I’ve always seen the powerful vernacular of the American canon as a gift and an instruction. But as for a readership, that’s a different matter. When I read American poetry, I don’t read it as an Irish person. I read it as a seeker of poetry. People find their way to poems no matter what. If they find their way to my poems, I feel honored.

I found one of your responses in an interview to be so inspiring: “This conversation we’ve been having all these years in Irish poetry is not only about gender, but about freedom: who is free to write this poem? Who is free to call themselves an Irish poet? Who is free to return to the past and challenge and question it about exclusions?” In many ways, I found your quote to be applicable to myself as an American poet of Chinese descent. To feel like you are writing at the margin of an already marginalized art form that is poetry can be somewhat demoralizing sometimes. How did you survive as an outsider for so many years?

It’s a very interesting question. And I appreciate your comment about being an American of Chinese descent. There are always rich and complicating parts of an inheritance that, looked at one way, invite a new interpretation. But looked at differently, they are both isolating and marginalizing. Irish poetry looked like a Bardic and male inheritance when I was young — and one that could easily have made me feel the subjects I wanted to write about were not large or important enough for that tradition. I struggled against that. I knew that if I wasn’t lucid and aware in that struggle I could easily end up doubting myself and my work. I didn’t want to end up writing someone else’s poem and justifying it with someone else’s language. So I tried to make my own space. What I found at the end of all this surprised me. I found that the margin is certainly an uncomfortable and even painful place to stand when you’re young. But it can be a valuable vantage point as you begin to grow and strengthen as a poet. It confers freedom. It confers perspective. Sometimes — as many poets have found — you can breathe more easily there.

What was it like for women poets of your generation as a group? Was it competitive or supportive? Would you say it was harder for women to find an audience then or now?

I think Ireland now — and well beyond it — is blessed by very strong and accomplished women poets who have finally been recognized as writing at the very center of the Irish poetic tradition. And an international one as well. Paula Meehan, Nuala ni Dhomnaill, Eilean ni Chuilleanain, Medbh McGuckian — these are all wonderful poets. And all very different from one another.

What’s your writing process like? How much and how do you consciously try to change from book to book? Do you feel joy or torture or something else when you write?

I don’t exactly feel joy or torture. Or I try not to. I definitely feel some exasperation at the fact that I don’t work more quickly. That I second-guess my poems so much. But, honestly, I think the majority of poets feel like that to a greater or lesser degree.

Do you think poets need to suffer to write great poems?

Only in the Latin sense. The old Latin word “patior” carries the sense of knowing, enduring, apprehending. Suffering the world through instinct and knowledge and feeling. That’s what poets do. Not so much a process of pain as a duty of instinctive comprehension. In that sense, any poet suffers the world. But your question also hints at the mythology of self-destruction that’s a part of poetic history. I feel so much resistance to that. Even in my lifetime some poets — Plath is obviously one — died by suicide, and were an infinite loss. Every suicide, every addiction, every disappearance of a poet through pain or loss of stamina seems to me a bleak loss. I just read that part of poetic history with the feeling that a temporary condition robbed us of the permanent power and light of their language. In the case of a poet like Plath, that hurts, even right up to the present moment.