What do you think of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and the work that they do and the research they have done on women and publishing and lack of book reviews on women writers?

I think VIDA does wonderful work, and has a challenging, compelling website which is helpful to anyone who visits it. There are not enough VIDAs.

How would you say the poetry landscape has changed today compared to when you were first starting out?

The poetic landscape — to use your term — was so small, so tribal when I began that it could hardly qualify as a candidate for change. It was the Irish poetic world, and in my teens and twenties it was the most intensely marked horizon I could imagine. There’s a wonderful poem by Milosz called “Happiness” which looks back at the Krakow of his poetic youth. It has a kind of piercing accuracy. He writes: “In their black capes poets strolled the streets. / Nobody remembers their names today.”He finishes with the line “This is our beginning. Useless to deny it.” I feel that way about the Dublin I knew as a young poet. And in my memory, it’s changeless. I don’t notice too many other changes. Or at least I’m not a reliable witness to them.

Would you characterize yourself as an ambitious poet? Why or why not?

Every poet is ambitious. It’s a difficult task, to make a good poem, to do it again when you’ve done it once. Then to try to do it twice. And so on.

Do you read more experimental or more avant-garde poetry of today? If so, what do you think of this kind of writing?

I’m not sure I categorize poetry that way. I enjoy an enormous amount of contemporary poetry, and I’m open to it all.

What advice might you give women poets who are also mothers of young children?

Once again, I wouldn’t presume to give advice. But I think I understand something of what they go through, and the difficulties they have. I certainly remember how distracted I was when I had two little children under the age of three. Every day I felt it was almost impossible to get anything started or finished in terms of poetry. So I kept a notebook. If I couldn’t write a poem, I could write a few lines. If I couldn’t do that, I could note down an image. It helped. I also understand, from my own experience, that the difficulties aren’t just about time and energy, although that’s part of it. It’s also about the psychology of being a poet, of being creative. There is something powerfully collective about being a mother. It joins you to community, to custom, to the history of human love itself. But, on the other hand, there’s something powerfully individual about being a poet. At times it’s a hard, uncertain journey going from one to the other, defining one place for yourself and then the other. I remember that. And I feel for it.

What kind of projects are you working on now?

I brought out A Journey With Two Maps earlier this year. Now I’m sort of gathering a new book of poems. But I’m slow, as always!